Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You'd think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers -- to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

But why in the world would anyone think that writers should be "bending over backwards" to appeal to people who have no interest in reading? What bizarre conception of literature would have it intended primarily for nonreaders? The mangled logic of this view, which perversely seems to be widely shared by many who do read, seems to me so far removed from any plausible assessment of the place of "literature" in our culture as to be pretty close to insane. That "literature is not very popular" at a time when the most potent measure of popularity is American Idol ought to be seen as a sign it still offers some hope of resistance to the values of commerical culutre. Most of all it should be seen precisely as an opportunity to experiment with aesthetic strategies that challenge audiences rather than giving in to the inexorable pressure to "dumb down."

Since when have serious writers sought to be "maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting" above all? Until the 19th century, "Literature" (or what was then simply considered "poetry") could only appeal to that minority of the population who literally could read, and most writers wanted to be "maximally accessible" not to contemporaneous audiences so much as to posterity, where the final verdict on literary greatness would be rendered. It's doubtful that Spenser or Milton thought that this audience would consist of readers for whom they needed to slavishly "ingratiate" themselves in advance. Some like to point out that Shakespeare in his time appealed to a relatively popular audience, but who could carefully examine Shakespeare's texts and conclude other than that the "accessibility" of his language comes not from any attempt to be more "straightforward" but from an assumption that his audience had sufficient listening skills to invite themselves into his imaginative world?

"Literature" of course is itself a concept that develops during the 19th century and after as an umbrella term that attempts to gather "poetry" together again with its now renegade forms, fiction and drama, precisely in order to make them available to the newly literate middle class as "good for" such readers. However, even this dilution of literary value--by which literature becomes valuable not in and for itself but as a tool of education and emergent nationalism--assumed that the appreciation of works of literature was something to aspire to, that "great books" required an elevation of taste and skill, although "common readers" could indeed reach this higher level.We now appear to have reached the point where literature can be relevant only if it turns itself into just another "inviting" mass entertainment.

The larger point of Shriver's essay, about the use of quotation marks, is just puerile: "By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous." Forget that the "quoteless fad" has been around since at least James Joyce and William Gaddis. Forget that not just quotation marks but dialogue itself are optional in fiction--who said that novels should record speech in this way at all? Heaven forbid that any "onus" be put on the reader to recognize that fiction isn't just a prosy version of a tv drama, with some written-out bits to supplement the talking. If Lionel Shriver's version of "literature" is what it takes to move the average books read per year from six to seven, writers ought to preserve their backs and refrain from bending over too frequently.

So, which characters are truest to life? Those we know best: those who we can most completely relate to, regardless of how fantastical. . .The essential question to ask: is this fictitious entity relevant to me and my life? Does she encounter or answer important questions that I may have about my life? Am I affected by his situation? In short, is there something of this character alive in me? This surely is the measure of ‘lifeness’ and indeed great fiction: the amount of blood the reader and character share. How relevant the thoughts and actions of one are to the other. How applicable fictional situations are to real life ones.

It's hard to imagine a more narcissistic view of the role of fiction--almost literally, it should reflect my own face back to me--and I really have to wonder whether Nigel intends this to be taken altogether seriously. I suppose he might be making a point that in order to enter a fictional world, readers need to be able to envision themselves in that world through a character with whom they can at least minimally identify, but otherwise this is about as reductive an account of the appeal of fiction as I've come across.

Of course, the biggest problem with it is in its underlying assumption that "Novels that emphasize character seem. . .closer to life, more natural." Presuming that "more natural" novels are from Nigel's point of view superior novels (a pretty safe conclusion, I think), one can argue with this assertion in at least two ways . Is it true that character-centered novels are "closer to life"? Is it necessary for novels to be "close to life," in the sense that "fictional situations" be "applicable" to "real life ones"? Nigel opines that novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Red and the Black are closer to his life, but why couldn't fiction that emphasizes setting or incident be just as "close to life," especially if "realism" is the preferred goal? (And I'm not so sure either of these two novels actually are character-centered: Karamazov seems to me an excuse for abstract philosophical debate rather than an attempt to create plausible characters, and The Red and the Black is at least as much plot-focused picaresque as a portrait of its ultimately rather two-dimensional protagonist.) Are characters more real than places or activities?

Certainly the origins of the novel do not lie in "situations" that are rendered as closely as possible to those of "real life." Precursors to the novel such as Gulliver's Travels or Gargantua and Pantagruel are plot-heavy phantasmagorias, anything but explorations of character, while most of the earliest actual novels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, are either explicitly picaresque narratives whose characters never develop beyond their roles in the plots or tales in which what happens is clearly the focal point, not characters "relevant to me and my life." Those readers like Nigel, who recoil from novels "which impose artificial form on formless real life experience," even when such form is simply "plot," have formed a relationship with fiction rooted in late-nineteenth century realism, later developed into "pyschological realism," that might arguably be called character-centered, but such readers assume this sort of fiction essentially brought literary history to a halt and that other kinds of fiction, less dependent on "lifeness" so very narrowly conceived, are simply marginal, trivial, empty flourishes easily ignored. Only character-driven realism is "natural."

This attitude strikes me as ultimately rather contemptuous of "the novel" as a form of literary art, as anything other than an opportunity to project one's own psychological preoccupations onto fictional characters. The order that form imposes is, after all, an aesthetic order without which a work of fiction really has no reason for being. Unless one can turn novels into some sort of religious meditation or "spiritual" quest, which is about all I can make out of the attempt to force fiction to "answer important questions that I may have about my life" and of language like "amount of blood the reader and character share." When the stakes are raised this grandly, "art" can't be anything but a nuisance.

In a recent post, Rohan Maitzen suggests that responsible criticism (she has academic criticism in mind, but the point would seem to apply to generalist criticism as well) should concentrate not on "comparative measures of ‘worth’" but on "seeking out the measures that fit the particular case." She continues:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

Rohan seems to assume that because in my posts both here and at my own blog I defend the view that "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are unimportant (even undesirable) in the novel, or at least far less significant than aesthetic effects" (really more the latter than the former) I would not accept the approach to literary criticism she is describing. But in fact I wholeheartedly endorse Rohan's critical pragmatism; indeed, this kind of pragmatism is at the very core of my philosophy of criticism, along with John Dewey's insistence that it is the aesthetic experience of literature that is the immediate object of critical appreciation, an experience that can be satisfied in a multitude of ways. I do not agree with Ronan McDonald and others that "if [literary criticsm] is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative" Even if I acknowledged that criticims needs "to reach a wide public" (which I emphatically do not), I could, I think, make a plausible argument that this "wide pubic" would be better served by a descriptive mode of criticism that seeks to carefully elucidate the manifest qualities of a given text than by an evaluative act that in effect disclaims the reader's own powers of judgment by rendering them unnecessary.

I would also agree that it isn't the case "that reading a novel on its own terms should always be the end point of criticism," although I do maintain--this is really what my allegiance to "aestheticism" finally amounts to--it is a indispensable and necessary beginning point. And I also assume that the act of writing a novel is inescapably an aesthetic endeavor. There would be no point, except in the crudest forms of propaganda, to write fiction in the first place if the primary goal was not to produce a work that succeeds most immediately as art. Since novels and short stories inherently equivocate, unavoidably qualify and make ambiguous anything that might be straightforwardly "said," anyone who wants to "comment" on social life or engage in philosophical speculation would be well advised to do so more directly than fiction allows.

Which is why I can't agree with Rohan that approaching "a novel in which philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are extremely important" is simply a matter of adjusting critical focus away from aesthetic considerations and toward the "something said," judging it by the non-aesthetic criteria it seems to propose for itself. At this point, the pragmatic impulse threatens to become an all-purpose excuse for whatever aesthetic lapses are deemed irrelevant to the larger goal of "philosophizing, politics," etc. It comes close to allowing that some novels don't need to offer "aesthetic effects" at all, if this means interfering with the "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary" with which they are principally concerned. Even if you emphasize "how the form and artistic strategies of the novel serve those [ulterior] purposes," as Rohan suggests, this is a pretty tepid measure of the work's literary value. If the primary requirement is not that the work engage us through "form and artistic strategies" above all, its ulterior purposes aside, it is hard for me to understand why fiction should be distinguished from other modes of discourse in the first place, why it should be included with poetry as part of "literature" at all.

Rohan says she's "wondering about the relationship between what I’m calling the 'pedagogical' habit of trying to find the best reading tools, the right measures, for any given example, and other critical strategies or purposes." I believe that by now the "pedagogical habit" has subsumed all other "critical strategies or purposes," to the extent that the need to adapt literature to the academic curriculum has become the overriding consideration in academic criticism. Periodization makes it necessary to find a "place" for texts "in which the form and aesthetics are far less impressive" than others and to accentuate "the contingency of different standards." The rise of theory made it necessary to situate the text in the framework of external schemes that supposedly broaden the context in which literary works can be studied. While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to "philosophizing," et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It's possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, "artistic merit" might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.

In a post criticizing science fiction blogs for allowing "the SF blogosphere [to] become a venue for crassly commercial interests far more concerned with selling things than encouraging intelligent discussion," Jonathan McCalmont notes my own previous post distinguishing between "liblogs" and "critblogs" and suggests such a distinction is "more about retreating from the existing public sphere than it is about changing it."

I think he's probably right, although I would describe the effort to establish the category of "critblog" more as a separation of blog-centered critical writing from the necessarily ephemeral "daily digest" style of blogging than a full-on retreat from the "public sphere." Nevertheless, I share McCalmont's dismay that many litblogs have simply accomodated themselves to the "public sphere" of superficial literary discourse rather than continuing in the attempt to provide an alternative to that discourse. This is even more discouraging for "mainstream" literary fiction and criticism, since it gives in not merely to the commercialization McCalmont decries in the SF community but also to the unexamined assumptions and shallow thinking that make journalism-based commentary on "literary fiction" so crippling to begin with.

McCalmont correctly notes that

whenever commercial interests enter into a public space, they change the focus of discussion from what is good or interesting, to what is worth buying. We can see this effect in the fondness of the SF blogosphere for book covers, give-aways, recycled press releases and interviews that are far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view. By contrast, actual substantial reviews are few and far between (especially outside of specialised review sites) and when they do appear they are seldom discussed, seldom linked to and seldom responded to.

I don't know that I would say most mainstream litblogs are "far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view", but there is a distressing number of "give-aways, recycled press releases," and perfunctory interviews in the literary blogosphere as a whole, and "substantial reviews," sustained critical reflection in general, certainly are all too often "seldom discussed" in comment threads. Too much space is given over to perpetuating the "book business" status quo, reinforcing middlebrow standards and enabling market-driven reviewing practices rather than challenging and critiquing them.

Yet I do think it's ultimately pointless to expend too much energy directed at "changing" the literary public sphere, either generally ("literary journalism") or literally (the public blogo-sphere). Capitalism will continue to trump literary worth among the big publishers, gossip and book business fandom will continue to dominate high-profile literary discussion. Many litblogs will be swept up (have been swept up) into the publicity machine. Trying to halt all of this is as futile as the effort to make fiction palatable to nonreaders, which is finally what motivates the existing public sphere in publishing and book reviewing in the first place.

Even so, the blog remains a useful publishing tool, and the blogosphere a valuable publishing medium. Just as it was always possible--although harder to do for financial reasons--to maintain a space for worthwhile literary criticism in print among all the reams of wasted paper that constitute the majority of what appears in print form, it is entirely possible to stake out a segment of cyberspace for nontrivial criticism, notwithstanding the possibility that what was the literary blogosphere will drift into irrelevance. The audience for such criticism might be targeted and modest in size, but such has always been the case for any literary criticism that takes itself, and the work it considers, seriously.

By now, everyone attuned to the literary news is no doubt aware of Horace Engdahl's comments that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" when it comes to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

On the one hand, it seems likely that Engdahl's remarks were motivated by a non-literary (and entirely justified) dissatisfaction with American political and military actions over the last eight years, a dissatisfaction widely shared across all of Europe these days. Engdahl assumes, wrongly, that American writers, American "culture" more generally, are somehow complicit with these actions or at least haven't done enough to express their solidarity with European critics of American hubris as embodied by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. To this extent, one might grant Engdahl some forebearance, since his attitude probably reflects a momentary unhappiness with the United States that will surely abate with the passing of the Bush administration.

But on the other hand, Engdahl's comments do reflect some underlying assumptions about both American literature and the role of literature more generally that certainly warrant scrutiny. For one thing, while I suppose it is possible for writers to become "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" (especially if we take "mass culture" to be something other than "culture" itself, a separate realm driven by the same mindless forces that drive the American government), most depictions of "mass culture" in American ficion tend to be critical of that culture, if not outright satirical. Insofar as Engdahl has read much contemporary American fiction, it would seem he hasn't read it very well. Especially among those writers who might be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize--Roth or Pynchon or Barth--"mass culture" is an object of concern and ridicule, not something these writers seek to reinforce. That Engdahl would think otherwise does call his qualifications for the job of awarding a literary prize--the most esteemed literary prize of them all--into question.

One would have to presume that Europe remains "the center of the literary world" because its writers do not have such an unseemly obsession with their own nations' culture, but of course this hardly seems credible. However, since Engdahl provides no additional englightenment about what it actually means to be the world's literary center an alternative presumption would seem to be that Europe is central because, well, the Nobel committee most often awards the prize to European writers. I admit both a professional and personal bias toward American fiction in my own reading habits, but to the extent Engdahl is claiming the greatest contemporary writers are to be found on the continent of Europe, I must further admit I find the notion thoroughly unsupportable. There are certainly some very fine writers in Great Britain, but most of them are undoubtedly obscure to someone like Horace Engdahl (writers such as Tom McCarthy and Rosalind Belben), and among them are decidedly not the "name" writers Engdahl probably does have in mind--Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. There are also excellent writers in France and the German-speaking countries, and I have recently found myself particularly taken by several Eastern European writers whose work I had not previously read, but again the notion that any of these writers are "greater" than Roth, Pynchon, Coover, or Stephen Dixon seems to me palpably absurd. And that such now deceased postwar American writers as John Hawkes or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino were never even remotely considered for the Nobel Prize only highlights the essential cluelessness of those at the "center" of the European literary world.

The comments that have received the most attention in the print media and on literary blogs are Engdahl's suggestions that American writers are "too insular" and "don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Most people have interpreted this to be a criticism of American writers for not reading enough translated work, or for focusing on domestic "issues," but I find the claims as worded to be virtually incoherent. Either Engdahl is asserting that not enough American writers are contributing to some ongoing "dialogue" about literature separate from their own writing, or the allegation is that they don't conceive of their writing as a contribution to "the big dialogue of literature." As far as I'm concerned, both notions are equally preposterous. The first requires that we think of world literature as some kind of super seminar in which writers are the invited panelists and collegiality the expected behavior. It seems to subsitute "dialogue" among writers for literary criticism.

Most likely, of course, Engdahl means something like the second. American writers are too "insular" in that they don't offer their work as part of a cross-cultural discourse that Engdahl is defining as "literature." They are too "isolated" to see the value of this discourse. But literature isn't a "dialogue" monitored by self-appointed arbiters who decide what part of the conversation deserves a prize for its insight. It isn't an attempt to "say" anything, except circuitously or by accident. I'm tempted to construe Engdahl's scolding of American writers for their insularity as just another expression of impatience with the "merely literary," with writing that isn't morally or politically useful, but I doubt he really meant to go quite that far. He is simply reiterating a commonly-held, if implicit rather than thought-out, view that literature is more about dialogue and discussion and nicely articulated platitudes. less about art and aesthetic consummation, which indeed often occurs in isolation and, in literature, as a "dialogue" only between the author and his/her text.

One reason that poets are so infrequently awarded the Nobel Prize has to be that it is much harder to value poetry primarily for its relevance to "the big dialogue." Poetry more clearly foregrounds the aesthetic amibitions of literature, and even those who read novels for the "something said" are often willing to concede that this model is overly reductive as applied to poetry (when such readers even admit to reading poetry--many simply confess they don't "get" it). But since the Nobel Prize seems to be decided according to the criterion that a writer "say" things (that, and the implicit requirement that the prestige of the prize be spread around a little--every once in a while a Chinese or Arabic writer--to enlarge the "dialogue"), poetry, or, God forbid, experimental writing, is neverthless going to be left at the door. Such exclusion of writing that in its necessary inwardness doesn't meet the blandly humanitarian standards of the Nobel committee is just one of the reasons why this literary prize, the biggest, is also the most idiotic.

As found in her new book, The Suburban Swindle, Jackie Corley's stories would seem to be classifiable as a kind of slice-of-life realism, episodes, some quite circumscribed and plotless, that add a little fictional flesh to bare-bones themes of cultural anomie announced in the first paragraphs of the very first such episode, "Blood in Jersey":

What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We're what happens when you're bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude's basement trying to get the guy's white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes. You sit in those hordes and some emo kid takes out a bag of clumpy, dried-up weed and shakes it like he's accomplished something.

What this is is Jersey. This is fear so thick and buried under, you pretend you're not on fire. The boys are brawling on the front lawn and coming back down to the basement with finger-mark welts on their necks and bloody, rubbery scratches on their chests.

But while most of the stories do provide a brief and immediate immersion in the "oiled sadness" of suburban New Jersey youth, the aimlessness and alienation to which we are exposed might seem overly familiar, a little too reminiscent of various movie versions of alienated youth (although I nevertheless do not doubt the accuracy of the portrayal, nor the authenticity of its sources). And if The Suburban Swindle was just another depiction of youthful discontent with suburban life, it would not really be able to make much of a claim on our attention. However, the primary appeal of the book, at least for me, lies not in the details of life as endured in New Jersey but in those of its stylistic and formal features already to be perceived in "Blood in Jersey" and its opening paragraphs.

The pruned-back structure of a story like this (admittedly an especially brief one, although all of the stories, even those of a more conventional length, are similarly committed to an overall narrative minimalism) ultimately brings an increased emphasis on the language with which such a lightly plotted story is presented, on the story as the unfolding of its language. Often in this sort of narratively truncated realism "style" is notably de-emphasized, made as "plain" as possible, but here no attempt is being made to conceal the "writing" that, almost literally, turns out to everything in "Blood in Jersey," not just the vehicle for plot and character development. The first several stories in The Suburban Swindle likewise deflect the reader's initial interest in storytelling and characterization toward their own verbal flourishes, but even the stories that do introduce incident and more fully sketched-out characters still call attention to the prose with which such elements are deployed more that we might expect in conventional realism.

One might say that the "radical exclusion" manifest in these stories goes beyond the implicit narrowing of focus to be found in all short stories and extends to the exclusion of any extraneous plot devices and gestures at character "depth" that inhibit immediacy of expression. Of course, one could also suggest that the sparseness in plot and character only reinforces the essential realism of the stories, since the kinds of lives they portray are themselves likely to be rather short on "plot" and psychologically afflicted in generally similar ways. But whether form most often influences content or content determines form, the result in this collection is a kind of fiction in which the form of expression doesn't merely point us to its subject but is dynamically a part of it in a way that I, for one, find impressive:

The cigarette should burrow through him. It should take his skin to butter and give me a rabbit hole on his skinny, hairless arm. Then I could pull up his shirt sleeve any time I wanted and admire it, that charred empty well. It would always belong to me.

When I try to bring the coal down in the middle of a lazy map of freckles, he flinches again, laughing. His naked torso folds in on itself, as if he's blocking some probing, tickling hand, and he keeps giggling, high and sloppy and loud. He goes down to the floor, drink still buoyed up in the air by an extended right hand. ("Fine Creatures")

I wouldn't say that The Suburban Swindle is a flawless book--sometimes the familiarity of the material does subsume the liveliness of the writing--but it introduces a writer whose approach both to her subject and to the literary presentation it requires certainly makes me curious about what her future work might be like.

Steven Millhauser is correct to defend the short story as a form of "radical exclusion" that works through "austerity" but that can also through this very austerity "body forth the whole world." However, in making his case that the short story mostly settles for "a grain of sand" and leaves the rest of the observed world as the subject of novels, I think Millhauser is exaggerating the differences between the two forms, in a way that actually does an injustice to the novel.

According to Millhauser,

Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.

The most immediate overstatement here is in the association of novels with the "large" and the "exhaustive." This characterization clearly enough describes historically the practice of certain writers--Dickens, Dreiser--but not others--Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, certain novels--Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss--but not others--The Red Badge of Courage, The Trial. It also more accurately encompasses the Anglo-European novel than the American novel, which has always edged closer to what is generally called "romance" than to the "novel" and its inexhaustible realism. The romance, although not necessarily always "small," is nevertheless "selective," content, as Hawthorne put it, to "manage [its] atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." Romance doesn't seek to "devour" the world but to transform a discrete portion of it into a version of the writer's own imagining.

This "tendency" in American fiction persists among contemporary writers, especially those commonly identified as "postmodern." Thus even meganovels such as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, as "large" as they undeniably are, do not threaten to become "unwieldy, clumsy, crude." In both structure and style they bear the hallmarks of writers more interested in "hidden powers" than "things in plain view," intimate the possibility of "revelation," even if such revelation is perpetually deferred. Their "ponderous mass" belies an intensity of effect traceable in manner to Charles Brockden Brown, to Hawthorne and Melville, not to Richardson or Trollope, nor even Tolstoy. In American fiction, at least, the opposition between the hulking, indecorous novel and the delicate short story just doesn't very cogently apply.

A very good example of fiction to which this opposition decidedly does not apply can be found in the novels of Steven Millhauser himself. Edwin Mullhous, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler require somewhat more room for their stories of obsession to be fully developed, but they are hardly recognizable as the sort of graceless beast Millhauser describes in his essay. They might be said to breathe a little more expansively, but they are otherwise as stylish and fully-shaped as any of Millhuaser's short stories (which themselves do have the kind of "completeness" Millhauser attributes to the short story.) Moreover, Millhauser has worked extensively in the novella, a form that at the very least straddles the divide between short story and novel, and as employed by Millhauser really only further undermines his own hard distinction between the two. Millhauser's novellas, collected in such books as Little Kingdoms and The King in the Tree, are just as elegant and selective as his stories (as anyone else's stories, for that matter), but they certainly do not shrink from assertions of "power," which in Millhauser's case results from the effort to encapsulate the world through fable and a twisted kind of allegory.

I think that ultimately all fiction involves a degree of "Faustian" striving, and that no fiction accomplishes "perfection." Fiction can never sufficiently "attain its desire" such that no further variations on a theme can be achieved, no additional aesthetic avenues of approach explored. And while it is possible to identify a strategy of "radical exclusion" that often does allow us to differentiate between story and novel, there is no reason why this strategy can't be practiced in those longer prose narratives we can't categorize as "short" stories and by tradition call novels. Millhauser's novels and novellas do this, as do, in different ways, the novels of Nicholson Baker, for example.If a novel has to conquer "territory" for it to be classified as a real novel, then I suppose Millhauser's taxonomy makes sense, but I don't see why this needs to be a defining feature of the novel in the first place.

My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me--namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one--with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. . . .

. . .All the humiliation and hardships he endured [in prison] are described in detail [in Memoirs from the House of Death], as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoevski had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. It is only natural that some of the convicts among whom he lived showed, besides dreadful bestiality, an occasional human trait. Dostoevski gathered these manifestations and built upon them a kind of very artificial and completely pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk. This was the initial step on his consecutive spiritual road. . . .

. . .His attitude toward the Government had completely changed since the days of his youthful radicalism. "Greek-Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and the cult of Russian nationalism," these three props on which stood the reactionary political slavophilism were his political faith. The theories of socialism and Western liberalism became for him the embodiments of Western contamination and of satanic sin bent upon the destruction of a Slavic and Greek-Catholic world. It is the same attitude that ones sees in Fascism or in Communism--universal salvation. . . .

. . .Dostoevski never really got over the influence which the mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence supplied that kind of conflict he liked--placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. When after his return from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen--the idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defence of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-antichrist Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-Russia on the other--when these ideas. . .suffused his novels, much of the Western influence still remained, and one is tempted to say that in a way Dostoevski, who so hated the West, was the most European of the Russian writers. . . .

. . .Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity--all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place." Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoevski the Prophet. . . .

. . .It is, as in all Dostoevski's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal--all the worlds of writers are unreal--but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . .

I disagree with Nabokov only in that I've searched in vain for the "excellent humor."

The basic message here is one of astonishment: Why would anyone ban books when literature is such a positive and ennobling force? Yet while I agree with that, I also believe that some books truly are dangerous, and to ignore that is simply disingenuous.

He continues:

Yet it's foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don't need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.

Throughout his essay, but especially in these quoted passages, Ulin betrays the sort of sloppy thinking and confusion about the nature of literature so prevalent among the practicioners of "literary journalism" in the mainstream print media. His ultimate point--that even obnoxious books ought to be tolerated--is cogent enough, if something of a bromide. But his enlistment of "literature" in the cause of defending "dangerous" books is hardly credible.

The most immediate flaw in Ulin's thinking is in his casual conflation of "literature" and "books." He invokes "literature" and its "positive and ennobling" associations, only to base his analysis on "books" understood as those works advancing an argument, that make a claim on us through "what they say." Ulin's analysis works only if he first evokes the literary as "ennobling" and then contrasts it with particular (in some cases repellent) books that no one would categorize as "literary" in the first place. It's a move that depends on the reader accepting the blithe but shoddy equation, books = literature, on which Ulin balances his argument.

But works of literature are not identical with "books." A literary work is a verbal composition that exists independently of its medium of transmission. It can be presented on paper, through bytes in cyberpace, or can be stored in a word processing file. (It could also, of course, be recited orally.) It is an act of linguistic imagination that does not coincide with any of these methods of publication (as in "making public") and can exist simultaneously in all of them. A book is a commodified object, an artifact of the printing press, the culturally-sanctioned form of communication assigned to journalists like Ulin for their "coverage." No matter how much they try to smuggle in references to literature in describing their subject, such journalists are always going to prefer books to literature because the former are presumed to have something to "say," provide the reviewer with the opportunity, as Ulin also puts it, "to confront someone else's ideas." Books are what prompt the editor of the New York Times Book Review to convert that publication into a forum for dreary "cultural criticism" and the pedestrian discussion of media-filtered "ideas." Literature is not to be found in its pages, except through the fortuitous conjunction of fiction and news, or an accident of publication date.

I would agree with Ulin that both good books and works of literature ought to "make us uncomfortable," but where the former do this by challenging established ideas about the subject at hand, the latter make us uncomfortable with our own reading practices, with our unsustainable assumptions about the very nature of the "literary." Literature is inherently neither "positive" nor "ennobling," and the "danger" it poses is not to be found in the printed embodiments of "someone else's ideas" but in the reading experience itself, the complacency of which is threatened by works of literature that seek to reconfigure perceptions of the literary. A preoccupation with "ideas" only reinforces such complacency, reducing the more expansive power of literature to the ordinary charge provided by "books."

A.N. Wilson on Dostoevsky (as examined in Rowan Williams's new book on the Russian writer):

. . .In the conclusion to his book, Williams makes the striking claim that the fusion of incompatibilities in which so much of Dostoevsky’s work consists, creates something comparable to the traditions of icon-painting.

It is this fusion of a surrender to the claims of an independent truth and a surrender to the actual risks and uncertainties of asserting this truth in word and action that makes the entire enterprise of spiritual – and specifically Christian – life one that is marked by the decentring and critique of the unexamined self. What is so distinctive about Dostoevsky’s narrative art is that he not only gives us narratives in which this difficult fusion is enacted; he also embodies the fusion in his narrative method, in the practice of his writing, risking the ambitious claim that the writing of fiction can itself be a sort of icon.

This seems right to me, and is precisely the reason why Dostoevsky is, in my opinion, such a terrible writer. He's a religious dogmatist and a reactionary conservative who uses fiction as, in Wilson's words, "demonstrations of the areas which have to be explored if one is to make sense of any of the great questions of philosophical theology." Unsurprisingly, most of Dostevsky's novels tell us that, once we've "explored" these areas, we would be well advised to become. . .religious dogmatists and reactionary conservatives.

It is incomprehensible to me that so many readers and critics have fallen for Dostoevsky's cheap tricks (and endured the unrelenting tedium of his fiction) and declared him an "existentialist" or religious "seeker" or some other such rot. Wilson's account of Dostoevsky the journalist--the "hectoring satirist, the bombastic nationalist, the predictable anti-Semite"--has always seemed to me a perfectly obvious description of Dostoevsky the novelist as well.

I can’t rightly say that my life has ever been changed by the reading of a novel. . .and more than that, I can’t think of any novel that has changed my thinking about life, the way I conceive the world, this matter of existing. - Which is to say, I guess, that I’ve never looked into novels for philosophy, for meaning; - and which may in turn be why I’m so antipathetic to novels which are largely concerned with “philosophising” or constructing philosophies, or at least the modes of interpretation which favour this approach to them (I certainly can’t think of a novelist who ever contributed anything important to human understanding; and for those about whom it is claimed, often none of it is their own thought at all, but they were themselves strongly influenced by philosophers. . . .

Since I, too, cannot think of any particular novel that "has changed my thinking about life," and since I also don't read novels "for philosophy, for meaning" and am antipathetic to "philosophizing" in novels (as well to the underlying notion that fiction is a medium for "saying something" in the first place), I want to agree with the further claim that no novelist has ever "contributed anything important to human understanding," but finally I really can't.

In the narrow sense of the term "understanding" that Obooki seems to be invoking here--"understanding" as philosophically established knowledge--it is certainly true that fiction has contributed almost nothing to the store of human knowledge. Even those writers whose work is loosely regarded as "philosophical" (Dostoevsky, for example) hardly introduce new ideas but instead reflect on extant "ideas" as embodied through character and incident (or have their characters reflect on them directly). The only original ideas to be found in novels, going back to the first recognizable examples of the form, are ideas about new ways to to exploit the literary potential of the form itself.

It is a common move when defending fiction's putative ability to advance "human understanding" to assert that it allows us to vicariously experience the lives of "other people" or to appreciate societies and cultures different from our own or some other such opportunity to expand our sympathies. Since these claims cannot hold up to critical scrutiny--there are no "people" in works of fiction, only hopelessly circumscribed verbal representations of them, no "culture" except as the faint traces discernible in idiom and other language practices (whick are even fainter in translation)--I will not appeal to the notion of "understanding" underlying them. While of course language and writing are "human" phenomena, it is the linguistic imprint of the "human" we experience in fiction, certainly not actual humans. This version of "human understanding" merely betrays the attempt to convert literature into a form of moral inquiry and instruction.

There is, however, a way in which fiction does produce human understanding, and not just feign or simulate it. According to the account of our experience of art and literature offered by John Dewey (which I have discussed in more detail in previous posts on this blog), our encounter with art can be the most alert and engaged of human experiences. In our free perception of the aesthetic (involving an act of imaginative projection commensurate with that initiated by the artist), we reach a level of pure experience, and a degree of self-awareness of experience as experience, unavailable in most other human endeavors. Via this intensification of experience, one might say that we acquire "human understanding" in the most direct and immediate sense: we more fully understand our own capacities as the creature able to both have an experience and to reflect on the nature of that experience. We realize more distiinctly what it is to be human.

Obooki suggests that at its most satisfying, the reading experience is a state of "induced reverie." This is not entirely inconsistent with Dewey's description of aesthetic experience, but I would use instead the words "sustained attention" to identify the effort involved in the most rewarding experience of art, including the art of fiction. Few other activities call forth our complete attention as thoroughly as works of art and literature potentially do, and the "human understanding" they thus afford ought to be an important enough contribution.

Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and unceremonious tone (idiosyncratic and unceremonious for a work of literary criticism, at any rate). Reviewers seemed to find both annoying distractions from the occasional critical insight Thirlwell offers, and their reservations about Thirlwell as a critic were generally confined to these admittedly unorthodox features of his book.

While it is true that the central argument Thirlwell wants to make in The Delighted States could probably have been made in a much shorter book, perhaps even in a critical essay, I can't say I found either Thirlwell's circuitous method of analysis, which proceeds both back and forth across time and national literatures and sideways from author to author (at times providing unusual and surprising juxtapositions), or his conversational style particularly bothersome. I take the travelogue approach to be Thirlwell's attempt to reinforce the book's overriding point--that fiction in effect speaks an international language that manages to survive its migration through translation from one literary tradition to another--in the form his book assumes, and it is an effective enough device. It might not be the sort of method one expects from a work of serious literary criticism, but there is no inherent reason criticism can't accomodate such an alternative strategy.

Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible. In The Delighted States, Thirlwell is making a case for the efficacy of translation that calls for numerous and at times subtle comparisons and analogies, and his manner of leading the reader along his route of unexpected congruences, pointing out the connections more as an enthusiastic guide than as a source of critical pronouncements, is a perfectly sound way to proceed. If the test of a worthwhile critic is whether his reader is able to regard an author. a text, or literary history with enhanced understanding, then Thirlwell passes this test readily enough.

Something that may have contributed to reviewers' lack of enthusiasm for The Delighted States is Thirlwell's emphasis on innovation in fiction, a preference that consistently informs his survey of literary influence and the role of translation in the evolution of fiction as a form. Along with his related emphasis on form (which he often conflates with "style"), Thirwell's focus on aesthetic innovation must have grated on the sensibilities of mainstream reviewers, who generally look askance at innovation as manifested in contemporary fiction and mostly ignore form in favor of what a work of fiction has "to say" (when they're not simply judging it for its superficial entertainment value, its success or failure at being a "good read"). For me, that Thirlwell's book illustrates the extent to which the history of fiction is the history of inspired change is its greatest virtue, but for some of its reviewers its own unconventional form as literary criticism may have only reminded them of Thirwell's implicit defense of the role of the unconventional in literary history.

None of the book's reviewers, however, chose to examine what to me is its most problematic claim--or, as it turns out, series of claims. In his commitment to the idea that all works of fiction are translatable, even down to a particular writer's distinctive "style," Thirlwell makes the following observations:

. . .A style may be as large as the length of a book. Its units may well be moe massive, and more vague, than I would often like.

A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless.

In fact, it can become something which is finally not linguistic at all. For the way in which a novelist represents life depends on what a novelist thinks is there in a life to be represented. A style is therefore as much a quirk of emotion, or of theological belief, as it is a quirk of language.

A style does not entirely coincide with prose style, or formal construction, or technique. (20)

In order to maintain his position that fiction can be translated without appreciable dimunition in the integrity of the translated text, Thirlwell needs to minimize the obstacles posed by "style" understood as a writer's characteristic exploration of the resources of his/her native language. One way to do that would be simply to dismiss the importance of style in comparison to all of the other elements of fiction that could well come through in a good translation without loss of effect. To his credit, Thirlwell does not do this; instead, he radically expands the meaning of "style" so that it includes. . .well, just about everything: It is "a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless."

But, of course, if style is everything, so "various" as to be "endless" in its features, it is actually nothing. Thirlwell in fact deprives it of its one materially definable quality when he asserts that it might be "something which is not linguistic at all." This notion, that style is not fundamentally a phenomenon of language, recurs throughout Thirlwell's discussions of his international (although primarily British and European) cast of writers, even of those writers, such as Flaubert or Chekhov, known for their attention to "linguistic" style. He picks up on Marcel Proust's comment about style as "quality of vision" and uses this phrase as a kind of summary concept encapsulating his definition of style in ist most "massive" incarnation. What persists in a translation, then, is this quality of vision, which in its grand scope dwarfs mere facility with language.

I confess I don't finally understand the need for this erasure of style in its tangible, most coherent form. However much it grasps metaphorically at a less tangible if still apprehensible object of our experience of fiction, to speak of "quality of vision" does not adequately account for the concrete achievements of writers as stylists. However much I value Flaubert's "quality of vision" (which is a lot), it just seems to me manifestly obvious that reading Flaubert in English is not the same experience as reading him in French. Reading Virginia Woolf in French cannot be more than a necessary if barely sufficient substitute for those French speakers without English who want to read her work. While I am reasonably sure that the comic vision of Stanley Elkin would still be preserved for those reading his fiction in a translation, how in the world could this writer's style survive the crossing-over?

Near the end of The Delighted States, Thirlwell scales back the grandiosity of his claims about translation:

All through this book, I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations--that although the history of translation is always a history of disillusion, something survives. . . . (429)

Yes, of course something survives. What serious reader sadly restricted to one language (or even two or three) would claim otherwise? Certainly I wouldn't. But I'm comfortable with accepting that this "something" includes inspired storytelling or formal inventiveness or compelling characters, but not style except in a more or less successful approximation. To stretch "style" into "vision" or "theological belief" is way too misty and metaphysical for me. I'm willing to settle for style as irretrievably "linguistic," a writer's artful way with words.

The increase in numbers of what are still generally called "literary weblogs" has been really quite astonishing. When I started this blog 4 1/2 years ago, there were a few dozen such blogs, perhaps 15-20 of them blogs I tried to read regularly. (I still think of these as the "original" literary blogs, and many if not most of them are still around.) By now, there are so many literary weblogs, approaching all genres of writing, literary news and the publishing business, and the role of literary criticism and book reviewing from so many different angles and to so many different purposes that the very term "literary weblog" does seem hopelessly imprecise. And even if one wanted to keep up with all the blogs that concern themselves in one way or another with literature or criticism, that would now be almost impossible.

Some of the new blogs that have appeared in the last couple of years, in particular blogs such as Paper Cuts, The Book Bench, and The Book Room, all sponsored by various print publications, have not, in my opinion, contributed much to the development of the litblog as a medium, however. These blogs have only reinforced the most reductive and stereotyped views of the litblog as a source of superficial chitchat and literary gossip. Few of the posts on these blogs explore any issue in depth or examine any particular book with even cursory specificity. There is no attempt to provoke cross-blog critical discussion, either vis-a-vis specific posts or generically--of the blogs I have named, only The Book Bench even includes a blogroll, and it is very short and limited to the usual suspects. Whatever links that are provided are to the same old mainstream media stories to which so many other blogs are also linking and which, of course, ultimately only reinforces the supposed first-order authority of the kinds of print publication hosting the blogs in question. I don't know if I would go so far as to speculate that these newspaper and magazine-centered blogs are deliberately working to undermine the potential authority of literary blogs by creating examples demonstrating their vapidity, but the concept of the "litblog" they embody surely does trivialize what literary blogs have accomplished and might still accomplish.

Admittedly this concept was not created out of whole cloth by those operating these print-adjunct blogs. From the beginning, one model of the literary weblog has been the daily digest, brief entries on media-reported literary news along with links to specific news items or reviews or opinion pieces. Often enough, however, the blogger's underlying attitude toward the item at hand, the blogger's own literary sensibility, was really the point of such posts, and so even bloggers who stuck to the digest form usually managed to convey a point of view about the subject at hand--indeed, litblogs would never have captured the attention they did attract, prompting the appearance of these old-media blogs in response, if they hadn't offered a perspective on current books and other literay matters not to be found in existing media. Nevertheless, the literary blogosphere as a whole relatively quickly progressed beyond the daily digest, and while posting became less frequent it also became longer and more fully developed. If literary blogs have not exactly become substitutes for book reviews and critical journals, they have become sources of genuinely engaged literary discussion, ranging from conventional book reviews to both short and long-form critical analyses to full-blown scholarly essays. Combined with the ability through commenting and linking to extend critical discussion immediately and directly, the scope and the quality of literary blogs have allowed them, at least for me, collectively to supersede in interest and utility most of the remaining newspaper book review sections and those few magazines that still occasionally offer literary content. (I stopped reading scholarly essays published in academic journals a long time ago.)

As a way of noting the evolution of the literary weblog to its current form as a medium for serious literary inquiry (and as a way of calling attention to the retrograde assumptions of the old-media blogs), I have re-categorized my blogrolls to reflect the present state of the literary blog more accurately. I have made a basic distinction between what I would still call a "litblog" and the kind of more critically expansive blog I now think of as a "critblog." (Not all of the blogs listed under "critblogs" are focused only on literature.) The line I have drawn between the two is no doubt a little blurry in some instances, but the litblogs are the blogs that still fulfill some of the functions assumed by the first wave of literary weblogs but do so in a particularly enlivened and useful manner (I think them useful, at any rate), while the critblogs feature, either regularly or with some reliable frequency, posts explicitly intended as criticism. The latter may or may not be conventionally discursive literary criticism, but sheer length and adherence to the customs of critical writing are not the qualities I necessarily look for in a critblog. Quality of insight and/or specificity of analysis are what I hope to find. I will continue to identify blogs that exemplify these virtues and will add them to the blogroll as warranted.

And as a way of perhaps further contributing to the evolution of the litblog to the critblog and beyond, I am planning within a few months to inaugurate a new project that will, I hope, extend the reach of the kind of critical writing originating on blogs, the kind of writing to which I have mostly restricted myself on this blog, to encompass more formally-developed critical essays, specifically essays on contemporary American fiction. I intend to write some of the essays myself, but I would like to open up this new site (which will still be attached to The Reading Experience) to other contributors as well. However, unlike, say, Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation--which has otherwise led the way in demonstrating what a web-based literary review can accomplish--I would like this site to focus not on new books but on books from the recent past (post-1980) that deserve additional close reading beyond the attention they received in their initial reviews, by writers who deserve careful consideration (perhaps more careful consideration than they've previously received) as writers whose work may last. At this point, the plan is for these essays to appear on an ongoing or rolling schedule rather than in separate "issues" so that the whole archive of posted essays would always be readily available. I am currently writing an essay on Russell Banks's Affliction, which will presumably be the first of such essays to appear, but I will have more information about this projected site in the very near future.

Finally, I have reconfigured my "literary criticism" blogroll to include in one place all of the non-blog websites I can find that offer reviews and criticism (not including newspaper book pages). The list contains both web-only publications and print publications that offer at least a significant portion of their content online. If there are other sites that might be added to the list, I would appreciate being notified of such.

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"--if anything they have only increased in intensity--concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term--the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention--of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.--can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"--Lethem, Saunders, Wallace--are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.

Many of the posts on this blog are concerned with what is loosely called "experimental" fiction. Some people object to this term, finding it either overly general or awkwardly clinical, conjuring up images of the novelist in a lab coat. I find the term problematic only in that I think all fiction should be experimental: no fiction writer should rest satisfied that prose fiction has settled into its final and most appropriate form such that only reiterations of the form with fresh "content" is needed. However, to the extent that "experimental fiction" denotes the effort explicitly to push at the limits previous practice has seemingly imposed on the possibilities of fiction as a literary form, I am comfortable enough with the label and see no reason to abandon it altogether.

At the same time, "experimental" does cover a very broad range of strategies and effects, and some distinctions between different kinds of literary experiment and between works manifesting experiment to different degrees could certainly be made. Just to consider "experiment" in fiction at the most general level of adherence to convention--convention understood as a definable feature that has come to make fiction recognizable to most readers as fiction--it is possible to distinguish between works that set out to transform our conceptions of the nature of fiction intoto, and those that focus in a more limited way on producing innovative changes on specific conventions. The former might be called "transgressive" experiments that overrun the extant boundaries observed by most readers, critics, and other writers, while the latter might be regarded as "local" experiments that challenge "normal" practice but do so from within the boundary that otherwise marks off the still-familiar from the disconcertingly new.

Novels like Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable or Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew would be good examples of the former, while Jeffrey DeShell's The Trouble With Being Born (FC2) is more appropriately considered as a local experiment. Readers of The Trouble With Being Born would probably find it accessible enough, a family chronicle that traces the lives of a husband and wife from their youth to their extreme old age. Its autobiographical roots are explicitly exposed, as the family is the DeShell family and the couple's only child is named Jeff, but the book's most provocative feature is undoubtedly the way in which the couple's story is related. The husband and wife tell their own stories in alternating first-person narratives, but while Mrs. DeShell's story is presented in reverse order, beginning with her affliction by dementia in old age and proceeding backwards into her childhood, Mr. DeShell's story proceeds in the opposite direction, from childhood to lonely old age. The two stories meet at numerous junctures, and the overall effect is to provide a convincing account of a mostly dysfunctional marriage.

The novel's twinned first-person narration spares us the kind of tedious psychologizing to which we would potentially be subjected through the use of a third-person narrator "going inside" the characters's heads in order to understand them, but it does pose a problem shared by other first-person narratives that do not make clear their source in a plausible narrative situation--the narrator committing his/her story to the page directly (albeit in any number of possible forms of notation), or speaking it directly to some identifiable audience. Both Mr. and Mrs. DeShell tell their stories in seemingly disembodied voices that represent neither their attempts to reckon directly through writing with the direction their lives have taken nor the recitation of their experiences before at least a potential audience. It is understandable that the author wished to explore these characters' sense of themselves through ventriloquizing their voices, but such an unmotivated mode of narration occasionally calls attention to itself in a way DeShell probably doesn't intend:

My fiftieth birthday. I don't look fifty. I'm driving Jewell's Firebird with her to meet Tommy the Rock at Mr. Z's, a nightclub in the Springs. Tommy the Rock will be sure to have some broads with him. Too bad Dominic is sick. I told Frances that I was going down to the Knights of Columbus, but I don't think she believed me. Screw her. She doesn't know fun. If she hadn't gotten so fat, maybe I'd be with her more often. She can watch the fireworks at home with Jeff. The two of them deserve each other. My wedding ring is in my pocket.

In a passage like this, DeShell is forced to use his narrator to present information so transparently and so implausibly (no one really says such things to oneself) that narrative continuity is broken. Since it seems to me that DeShell is ultimately attempting to maintain the illusion of realism in character and narrative voice, and is not indulging in postmodern tricks by calling attention to narrative artifice, this storytelling strategy can make suspension of disbelief difficult to grant.

Perhaps it was necessary to employ this style of narration in order to allow the characters' voices their necessary role both in the unfolding of their separate stories and in the larger story those stories together create. Both perspectives must be provided. And despite the awkwardness occasioned by the choice of point of view (and by the consistency of its application), the novel's aesthetic strategy essentially does succeed in making The Trouble With Being Born a compelling read and in chronicling the fortunes of what is probably an all-too-common American family. It succeeds in turning our notions of chronology and contiguity against themselves to create a locally satisfying narrative experiment, even if in the final analysis narrative itself as the central focus of interest in fiction is not challenged and the protocols of point of view are actually reinforced. Such a book won't revolutionize the art of fiction, but its does perhaps help remind readers that the requirements for creating this art are not fixed in place.

The contributors to the blog OnFiction profess to be doing "research on the psychology of fiction." If we take this to encompass broadly the increasing popularity of "cognitive theory" and neuroscience in the analysis of literature and our response to literature, "psychology of fiction" attempts to describe our reaction to fictional characters as if those characters were real people with minds, who, as a recent post at OnFiction has it, provoke us to "wonder what they are up to." In this view of the reading experience, "we readers imagine ourselves into the minds of characters as we run the simulation which is the literary story." So do writers, which accounts for the reported instances of characters "exhibiting apparently autonomous agency" during the composing process.

As a reader, I have never "imagined myself into the minds of characters" while running "the simulation which is the literary story." Neither can I really believe that anyone else has done this. In the first place, in most fiction that to any significant degree asks us to consider the mental life of its characters, we are not encouraged to imagine ourselves "into" their minds. Their mental life is presented to us explicitly, often in the narrative mode called the "free indirect" method, sometimes directly through a stream of consciousness, or near stream of consciousness, point of view. We don't have to "wonder what they are up to" because the author/narrator makes it perfectly plain what they are up to. Perhaps it is the case that in some first-person narratives we are invited to read between, or behind, the lines the narrator literally offers us, resulting in a perception of the narrator's state of mind to which even he/she has little access, but I don't think this relatively special circumstance is what the "psychology of fiction" generally emphasizes.

Second, in what way does "the simulation which is the literary story" differ or depart from the literary story itself? Are we being told that the "literary story" exists as a way for us to imagine the characters in other situations, situations the story doesn't relate? That the story is merely an excuse for us to wonder abstractly about the characters in all of their "autonomy"? Or is it that the "simulation" we "run" is just the story itself and that when we "imagine ourselves into the minds of characters" we are simply envisaging what it would be like to be these characters involved in this story? If "character" is so overridingly important in a work of fiction that we are led to detach it from all other elements of the work and regard the characters as real people we might ask over for drinks, then why bother with the other elements of the story? The author could just send us a character sketch of his protagonist, whom we could then imagine in any circumstance we'd like. And while I do believe some readers project themselves into the situations in which fictional characters are portrayed, this has more to do with the operations of the readers' minds than those allegedly at work in the characters' minds. Such readers are more engaged with the story in which the characters appear than with the characters themselves, certainly more than they're connected to the "minds" of those characters.

Similarly, I'm sure that some writers do experience their characters exhibiting "autonomy," taking the narrative in directions the author didn't anticipate, but I doubt that very often this is a result of the author dwelling in the characters' "minds." In my own on-and-off career as a fiction writer, I have had characters wander off the plotted path, but never because I could read in their minds that they thought it best to do so. Either the character's voice seemed to provoke a change in plan, or the story itself prompted a change in character, or the character just didn't seem in general to be the sort of character who would do that rather than this. Realizing that a narrative needs to be readjusted because one's preconceptions about a character's role in it have been altered is an aesthetically sound decision, but it has very little to do with remaining alert to the "psychology of fiction."

If anything, a fixation on "character," even more reductively on the "inner life" of a character, only makes our response to the whole work of fiction more impoverished. The very best fiction, like the very best art in general, widens our perspective on the possibilities of the form as a form. It helps us enhance our experience of fiction by remaining alert to all of the artistic choices the writer has made. In John Dewey's words, "The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest." Isolating character as the most essential element in works of fiction potentially circumscribes our response to them, blinkers our awareness of the other aesthetic "operations" at work in the text. It inherently declares fiction to be this sort of thing--a way of meeting up with imaginary characters--rather than all the other things it might be. It renders stories and novels into case studies for psychologists rather than complex works of art.

Britt Peterson's Chronicle of Higher Educationarticle on the champions of "literary Darwinism" portrays these "scientific" literary scholars as threatening to overturn the currently entrenched academic approaches associated with Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. But at the level of its basic assumptions about literature--about why we study literature in the first place--there's absolutely nothing "new" about literary Darwinism, as Peterson makes clear, perhaps unwittingly, in his description of this method:

The most prominent [of the new science-based scholars] are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

To emphasize "evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts" is not different in kind from an emphasis on cultural patterns or historical patterns or, indeed, the kind of class-centered "patterns of behavior" emphasized by Marxism. What all of these appropriations of literature have in common is that they're really not about literature. Marxists have their political agenda for which literature seems a useful prop, cultural critics have theirs, and the literary Darwinists are now making a play at getting theirs a prominent place within the scholarship factory that academic criticism has become. Readers truly interested in the study of literature--not the study of science or sociology--have no more interest in reading Jane Austen for her representation of "mating rituals" than in reading James Joyce for his putative insights into the nature of Empire. These readers want to "study" both of these writers in order to more fully understand how their texts work, how they expand our ability to experience works of literature, to transform experience into aesthetic "patterns." Literary Darwinism will do nothing to assist such readers in the goal of engaging with literature as a singular form of art.

In this way, it isn't surprising that the Darwinists are encountering resistance from from "those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method." The "science" being employed by the Darwinists is not quite compatible with the "science" used by those enamored of "cognitive psychology," and thus the latter consider the former to be rivals in the competition to create the latest academic fad. And it is certainly not surprising that this whole "loosely defined group" would be opposed by the theorists and the sociologists, since they are in danger of being unseated at the academic big table, just as the theorists themselves began unseating the New Critics and the traditional historical scholars thirty-five years ago.

Prominent Darwinian Joseph Carroll gives the game away when he observes that

"The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do."

The worst thing that could happen to an ambitious academic critic is to be "left out in the cold," methodologically speaking. One wants to have tenure and as many publications in prestigious places as one can before the next group of promising scholars looking for something "new" comes along.

Carroll's Darwininian colleague Jonathan Gottschall makes it even more explicit:

"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies."

I don't know if Gottschall is being unusually honest or if he simply got careless in his word choice, but his invocation of "glamour" as the motivating goal of literary scholars, however dim and degraded such glamour might be--these are professors we're talking about, after all--only underscores how utterly trivial the "discpline" of academic literary study has become. It is about, and only about, itself as a "field" in the academic curriculum. All concern for literature as something that might be valued in its own right dissipated into the ivy-scented air long ago.

Peterson wonders whether literary Darwinism will "save literary criticism," but the only thing that will save literary criticism is, well, a revival of actual literary criticism. What the Darwinists are proposing is certainly not that. It's an effort to dislodge the "literary" from literary study once and for all. It seeks to subdue literature and all the remaining "subjective" responses to it and pin it to the wall of scientific scrutiny (at least to the extent that "literary Darwinisim" is actually science, which is altogether questionable). Gottschall is pretty clearly contemptuous of the established approaches to literary study, which, astonishingly enough, he seems to consider still too literary to be taken seriously. He's apparently an advocate of the notion that literary study has to be destroyed in order to be saved, although what remains as the object of scholarly study will then have no resemblance to literature whatsoever.

In a recent post at his Sentencesblog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges that it is a translation, and rightly notes that without it we who have no Russian would have no access to Grossman's writing at all, still, I am reluctant to myself conclude definitively that the quoted passage has precisely the qualities that Mason otherwise ably explicates. Indeed it is a translation, and it is possible the translator has actually improved it in its transformation into English, or made it worse, or in some other way failed to adequately render the original in a way that would dupicate the Russian reader's experience of Grossman's text.

This is not to say that the passage does not have the qualities Mason describes, and certainly not that Chandler's translation is ultimately a failure. I have no way of knowing whether it succeeds or not, and while I am usually willing to take the word of a critic proficient in another language that a given translation is acceptable or not, I am not thereby sufficiently emboldened to approach the text as a critic in the same way I am willing to work with a text written in English. Since I am a critic still attached to "close reading," to examining a work for its stylistic felicities and its formal characteristics, the awareness that with a translated text I am at best confronting it in a second-hand version is enough to warn me away from making any confident assertions about it.

Which is why I concentrate, both on this blog and in my other critical writing, mostly on fiction written in English, even more specifically on American fiction since I feel most able to engage with texts composed in American English (and also with the cultural realities often underlying American language conventions). In a sense I feel I am only capable of making specifically literary judgments on works in English, although I'm relatively certain the kinds of judgments I might make vis-a-vis American fiction are also relevant to fiction written in other languages. I just can't get close enough to such texts to be sure. There are times when the formal invention in an other-language work is evident enough that I can point it out with some confidence my critical eye is appropriately focused--most recently this happened with Magdalena Tulli's Flaw--but generally I stay away from making pronouncements on texts that in a sense I have not really been able to read in their native state.

I recognize that there are some critics fluent enough in second or third languages that they are perfectly reliable close readers of both English-language texts and of literary works in other languages. Unfortunately, the Spanish and French I learned well enough to pass a proficiency exam in graduate school are not good enough to allow me to pretend to read works in those languages other than in translation. This is probably a kind of self-imposed limitation on my range as a critic, but on the other hand I do feel that by restricting my critical commentary to (mostly) American fiction, I am able both to anchor my comments more firmly, and more deeply, in a particular literary tradition and its distinctive practices and to provide a context within which new works can be profitably read. It allows me to, perhaps, speak with somewhat more authority about American writers and writing by demonstrating a familiarity with the enabling assumptions, including assumptions about language, that have characterized American fiction over the long run.

I certainly don't want to imply that translations perform no useful service or that we in the United States need fewer, rather than more, of them. It's a scandal that so comparatively few translated works are made available to American readers and that so comparatively few of those readers seem to be demanding them. Translations allow us an important, if ultimately somewhat cloudy, window on the literary practices of the rest of the world, practices from which both readers and writers can and must learn. But given the haphazard way in which translations come to us (without much useful information about why this writer has been translated or why that writer is important), as well as my professed limitations as a reader of translations, I expect to continue emphasizing them on this blog only periodically.

Steven Millhauser could not really be called a neglected writer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, his books are reviewed relatively widely and usually respectfully, and he has his share of admiring readers. But I don't think he has been sufficiently recognized as the important and accomplished writer he really is. Since the early 1970s, he has produced a series of novels and short fiction collections that easily rival the fiction of any of his contemporaries in their imaginative depth, stylistic vigor, and formal ingenuity.

Millhauser's novels Edwin Mullhouse, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler form a significant part of his body of work, each of them singular achievements that nonetheless display Millhauser's signature preocccupation with the processes of imagination and with protagonists who become obsessed, even possessed, by the need to explore the limits of their own perpetually active imaginations. Each of them provides a reading experience unlike any the reader is likley to recall, and each of them should be included on any list of superior American novels of the past thirty-five years. But in my view, Millhauser's short stories and novellas are even better and constitute the core of his achievement. While the longer form allows Millhauser to demonstrate the breadth of his inventive powers, the concentrated intensity of the shorter forms seems especially suited to his particular kind of storytelling.

Millhauser's fiction is a variation on the mode of postwar American fiction Robert Scholes labeled "fabulation" (Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979). According to Scholes, "Delight in design, and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer. . .serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist or satirist. Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy." The work of few other writers manifests in both its own formal patterns and its emphasis on protagonists with various kinds of of artistic ambitions as much "delight in design" as Steven Millhauser's. While the "joy" that this art produces doesn't always lead to fulfillment in life, Millhauser's characters are nevertheless fixated on perfecting their work and cultivating the satisfactions that only it is able to bring them.

A very good example of this sort of art-focused fabulation can be seen in "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a novella from the 1993 collection, Little Kingdoms. J. Franklin Payne is a newpaper cartoonist who begins to apply his talents to the then (1920) embryonic form of the animated cartoon. His efforts prove artistically successful, but as he explores the possibilities of this new medium, continuing to use thousands of individual drawings rather than adopt time-saving background cels, he finds his painstaking art already at odds with the increasingly commercial practices of the film business. Franklin remains faithful to his artistic vision and methods, even as his domestic life is falling apart and his wife leaves him. He completes his magnum opus, Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon, but by this time he is not only the work's one true audience but in fact its only audience, however much he might imagine others there "to applaud him in the warm and intimate dark."

Like most of Millhauser's fiction, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is partly about an individual human being with intensely focused creative impulses, and partly about the way those impulses are transformed into works of aesthetic beauty and complexity. LIke many of Millhauser's protagonists, Franklin Payne's imagination leads him to unorthodox expression, to forms, such as the animated cartoon, that allow for the transgression of realism and aesthetic convention. Franklin, we are told,

. . .felt the desire to accept a certain challenge posed by the artificial world of the animated drawings: the desire to release himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible. But this desire stimulated in him an equal and opposite impulse toward the mundane and plausible, toward precise illusionistic effects. As the violations of the real became more marked, the perspective backgrounds became fuller and more detailed; and as he gave way to impulses of wild, sweet freedom, he found himself paying close attention to he look of things in the actual world: the exact unfolding of metal steps at the top of a down escalator, the precise patterns of reflections in the panes of a revolving door seen from inside. . . .

This view of art's purchase on reality is in keeping with that delineated by Scholes in his section on "fabulation and reality":

Fabulation, then, means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality. Modern fabulation accepts, even emphasizes, it fallibilism, its inability to reach all the way to the real, but it continues to look toward reality. It aims at telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional.

The pursuit of "such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional" leads Millhauser in other stories to more openly experiment with form rather than narrate the stories of fictional characters such as Franklin Payne who themselves are driven to artistic experimentation. "Revenge," from Millhauser's 2003 book, The King in the Tree, is a good example of such an effort. It takes the form of a woman showing her house to a potential buyer, who is addressed throughout, in the first person, as "you": "This is the hall. It isn't much of one, but it does the job. Books here, umbrellas there. I hate those awful houses, don't you, where the door opens right into the living room. Don't you?" Gradually we learn the "buyer" is a woman who had a long-term affair with the narrator's now-dead husband and that the narrator is taking the occasion to exact a sort of revenge by informing the mistress of the damage her actions have inflicted. The narrator takes the mistress on a tour of each room of the house, in effect using them to present her (and us) with an anatomy of the narrator's life and marriage.

"The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" and "Revenge" show Steven Millhauser to be a writer of great inventiveness and storytelling prowess, one whose work emphasizes the wonders of artifice--including the artifice that is fiction--but also tempers our delight in its artifice by truthfully depicting the limitations of such artifice in its ultimate confrontation with the irresistable forces of reality. These qualities can be found in equally compelling measure in Millhauser's most recent collection of short stories, Dangerous Laughter (2008). The author's use of fabulation to evoke fantastic worlds is memorably evident in "The Dome," a Barthelmean story about the erection of domes above and around homes, towns, and eventually whole countries, "The Other Town," about a town that has replicated itself, creating an "other" town the citizens of the "real" town visit in order to give themselves a more vivid sense of its (and their) existence, and "The Tower," about the aftermath of a multi-generational effort to build a tower that "grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven."

The focus on artist figures perfecting their craft in their own visionary if idiosyncratic ways can be found in "In the Reign of Harad IV," which tells the story of a court miniaturist who is able to reduce the size of his miniatures to the point of invisibility, in "A Precursor of the Cinema," which relates the life and career of a painter able to create such realistic effects that his subjects can be seen moving on the canvas, even to leave the canvas altogether, and, in its way, in "The Wizard of West Orange," a story about Thomas Edison and his work on the "haptograph," a device that simulates tactile sensations. "Cat 'N' Mouse" is a verbal rendition of a Tom and Jerry-like cartoon, "History of a Disturbance" is a final communication from a man who has given up on words, while "Here at the Museum" is a docent's guide to the "New Past" on display at the institution named in the title.

"Real life" is portrayed more directly, if still with Millhauser's usual fanciful conceits, in "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" and "Dangerous Laughter." In the former, Elaine Coleman has indeed disappeared, although she has neither run away nor been abducted. She has simply ceased to exist, a condition that, as the story makes clear, essentially mirrors her circumstances when she ostensibly did exist. As the narrator of the story puts it, "If it's true that we exist by impressing ourselves on other minds, by entering other imagainations, then the quiet, unremarkable girl whom no one noticed must at times have felt herself growing vague, as if she were gradually being erased by the world's inattention." The latter story relates how a group of teenagers during summer vacation begin holding "laughing parties," in which all involved break out in willed laughter. (Later, the laughing parties are replaced with weeping parties.) One girl, Clara Schuler, proves particularly adept at laughing out loud (it may be her only talent), but when the laughing fad fades she holds one last party at her own home, after which "The local paper reported that Mrs. Schuler discovered her daughter around seven o'clock. She had already stopped breathing. The official cause of death was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, but we knew the truth: Clara Schuler had died laughing."

Both of these stories use fabulation as the best way to get at the reality experienced by those like Elaine Coleman and Clara Schuler, who feel marginalized and ignored, to find those "correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality." They don't allow escape from the world through simple fantasy but aim at "telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional."

Millhauser's most provocative fantasies generally explore explicitly the gray areas between art and reality. In Dangerous Laughter, the most striking example of such a story is "A Precursor of the Cinema." Harlan Crane is a "Verisimilist" painter whose invention of "animate" paint allows him to to take his paintings a step beyond realism to the kind of photographic illusion of the real achieved by film. According to the story's narrator (an art historian of sorts) "Harlan Crane's animate paintings are more unsettling still, for they move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception and have the general effect of radically destabilizing the painting--for if a painted fly may at any moment suddenly enter the room, might not the painted knife slip from the painted table and cut the viewer's hand?"

Part of the humor of the story (and there's almost always an embedded humor in Millhauser's fiction) is in in the narrator's matter-of-fact way of presenting Harlan Crane's "invention" as if the idea of animate paint were not manifestly ludicrous, but the notion that art can "move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception" in a move that has the effect of "radically destabilizing" the work is one that has resonance not just for the paintings of Harlan Crane but also for the fabulative fiction of Steven Millhauser. His fiction consistently moves "back and forth" between the world we think we live in and the invigorating deceptions with which it both warps and truthfully renders that world. It "destabilizes" our idea that these two things are incompatible if 'realism" is the goal.

Steven Millhauser is one of the remaining postmodernists (a late postmodernist, perhaps) still publishing vital, challenging work. Dangerous Laughter is a book long-time readers of Millhauser's fiction will certainly value, but also one that could provide readers less familiar with Millhauser a compelling introduction to that fiction. Although such readers will then want to turn to the previous books for a more complete appreciation of one of the best living American writers.

Pacifist Viking (Costanza Book Club) frequently posts about the need to grant both reading and literature "multiple uses." In a recent post, PV writes:

I try to avoid [a] narrow, limiting definition of what literature is, what it can be used for, and how one ought to approach it, for two clear reasons. First, approaching literature is primarily an individual activity, and the great diversity of humanity must call for multiple subjective approaches to literature. And second, there are so many potentials for literature, it seems harmful to try and limit those uses.

Now, on the most fundamental level it is of course not true that "approaching literature is primarily an individual activity." Not only does the reading of works of literature involve at a minimum an interaction between writer and reader (and thus a kind of partnership), but "literature" is itself unavoidably a social/cultural/historical phenomenon to which the "individual" comes only through the mediation of cultural processes and of literary history.

Literature is "literature" because we have inherited this concept as a way of identifying a certain kind of imaginative writing deemed worthy of consideration in and of itself as something separate from ordinary discourse. The term has always been somewhat unstable (or at least so capacious in meaning that it can accomodate changing tastes and assumptions), but never has it been so completely relative as to mean whatever the "individual" reader wants it to mean, which is to in effect render it meaningless. If we want to hold on to "literature" as a category of writing acknowledged by everyone (or everyone interested in this kind of writing), then we have to also acknowledge that its contents can't be judged simply through "individual activity."

Previous readers and critics have inevitably left their traces on the books we now want to read "on our own." The very availability of these books for our reading pleasure has largely been determined by those previous readers' choices (many other books might have made their way to us, but haven't), and the urgency with which we want to read some books (the "classics") is also to a significant extent a consequence of critics' evauation and discussion of these books. This is not to say that works of literature must always be "historicized" in the manner now de rigueur in academic criticism, but simply to recognize that what we call "literature" is so as part of an ongoing historical process of reading and analysis.

Literary criticism as the act of sifting through what is offered as literature, of making discriminations and of judging works of fiction or poetry, is thus as integral a part of the literary enterprise as the creation and the "individual" reception of literary works. To suggest that a given poem, story, or novel is especially accomplished or disappointingly weak, according to articulatable standards, is not to rob the reader of his/her "subjective approach" but to provide a context against which the reader might measure his/her own response. To apply critical criteria derived from careful and extensive study of literary history and aesthetic precepts is not to belittle the reader's own standards but to encourage the reader to engage with that history and those precepts and apply them as well--an activity that will always have a "subjective" character to it.

I don't deny that "multiple" readers will ultimately find different "uses"--different elements of value--in the books they read. And I don't fully disagree with the notion that reading is at some point an "individual activity." The experience of reading poems and novels does indeed consist of the reader's fully attentive encounter with the text, but that encounter is first of all with the author's aesthetic methods, his/her "making" of the text, in the same way we encounter a painter's execution on the canvas or the composer's shaping of sound. Those methods are always themselves informed by the author's influences and familiarity with the past practices of the form, however, and thus we are returned to literature as a collective, and to that degree objective, endeavor.

Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others (Starcherone Books) could not be more different from his previous novel, Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto. The latter is long and (literally) garrulous, a crazed monologue by a concert violinist who seizes the opportunity to regale his captive audience with the story of his friend, the composer Schneidermann, rather than play his scheduled cadenza. The former is short and fabular, narrated by an Israeli boy who has been blown up by a suicide bomber and finds himself in the wrong heaven--the Muslim heaven.

Cadenza is a maximalist novel that attempts to encompass--through Schneidermann--Jewish history in the 20th century, while A Heaven of Others is a minimalist novel that focuses on a single Israeli family without particularly emphasizing its Jewishness. And while Cadenza relates the stories of two older men and their accomplished, eventful lives, A Heaven of Others presents us with the abruptly terminated life of a ten-year-old yet to experience more than the formative days of youth.

Yet both of these books show Joshua Cohen to be a writer of determinedly innovative inclinations and should impress readers--whose numbers ought only to increase--both as already accomplished works of fiction and as harbingers of further engagingly experimental efforts to come. If A Heaven of Others is not exactly the book one might have expected from the author of Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto, that very fact on reflection seems only to indicate this is a writer who will not necessarily pursue the same set of unconventional strategies (unconventional at first) but will produce experimental work in the purest sense: fiction that continues to surprise.

Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of A Heaven of Others is the style Cohen has fashioned for his recently deceased narrator.

Now that he has made his ascent, he is wrong. In the wrong. Being dead, he's correct. But being dead where he is, he's in error. Incorrectly mistaken. Not him but here is what's wrong, all wrong, and the timing of it, too, for him, for now and for here.

Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and their hairy and rotting though seemingly citric oiled flanks, exposed hunks of bunched phosporescent bone to hug tight with your thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold on and hold tight, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus, maybe hoping I'd guide them to safer, smoother landings. But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.

This is a nicely-calibrated blending of the natural ingenuousness of a ten-year-old boy (presumably rendered in Hebrew-inflected English) and the free-flowing perspective of one who has just become disembodied and finds himself inhabiting a realm where terrestrial linguistic conventions probably no longer apply. It lends the novel a kind of dreamlike poetry that is its most distinctive, and most compelling, quality.

What begins as a "mistake," a misplacement of the Israeli boy in the wrong heaven, becomes a realization on the boy's part that heaven must ultimately be the abandonment of all earthly religious divisions:

Listen and I will say what I have said. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I'm not. Jewful and Jewless. Listen. Then hear. Understand. To be religious in heaven is to be truly fanatic. . . .

And he learns to face the only eternity likely to be in store for us:

. . .Mostly however I am ambivalent about and to this death. Thriving off the fund of numb. And so to my death, too. Sunned. Both were inevitable. Are. Or at least one happened and another will happen, and so you will notice that I still say and so think Will happen becuase a mind of mine wants to believe in a future. Listen that that, too, will pass. Into waiting for waiting. Which will pass as well, on its own. There is not waiting in the future and there is no future in the (you understand). Listen and then passing will pass. Hearing, too. Again await the all over again. Understand, then listen anew.

An interview with Joshua Cohen can be found here, in which he discusses his work-in-progress, a novel that will apparently continue the thematic focus of A Heaven of Others, about "the last Jew on earth."

ADDENDUM A Heaven of Others is accompanied by numerous illustrations by the artist Michael Hafftka. While the drawings are, as far as I am able to judge, interesting enough, I can't really say they add much to or work very provocatively with Cohen's text. Perhaps a hybrid of fiction and art that truly reinforces the former, creates something new from the interaction of each, might still be created, but I don't think this is it.

Max Apple's debut, the short story collection The Oranging of America, was published in 1976, and in retrospect seems a kind of transitional work between the energetic postmodern comedy represented by, say, Stanley Elkin and the sort of "minimalism" practiced by a writer like Bobbie Ann Mason, whose fiction was widely noted for its references to the various brand names and other cultural artifacts of contemporary American popular culture. Apple's fiction, both in The Oranging of America and his 1978 novel, Zip, shared the comic perspective of Elkin's fiction, although in a somewhat more muted, less astringent way, but it also signalled some paring-down of postmodern excess, an affinity with the minimalists and their implicit critique of maximalist postmodernism, their return to quieter forms of storytelling.

To some extent, we have been deprived of the opportunity to witness Apple's further development of this hybrid mode of fiction. Since Zip, he has published only two other works of fiction, the 1984 collection Free Agents and a second novel, The Propheteers. Free Agents was actually an even stronger set of stories than The Oranging of America (with its famous title story about motel magnate Howard Johnson), more adventurous, less tied to conventional narrative. (Oranging was innovative in terms of subject matter, but not so much in the narrative forms employed.) It includes several stories that provocatively blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, employing "Max Apple" as their protagonists, while some of the other stories, such as "An Offering" and "Post-Modernism," are humorously unconventional in form (the former is an initial stock offering for "Max Apple, Inc.," which markets Max Apple's "private fantasies" through "stories, novels, and essays fit for mass consumption"), what might be considered kinder, gentler versions of postmodernism--which the latter story describes as the effort to compensate for the fact that writers "are stuck with beginnings, middles, and ends, and constantly praying that the muse will send us a well-rounded, lifelike character." The Propheteers, on the other hand, is in my view a weak novel expanding on the story "Walt and Will" from Free Agents and to me inferior to the story and its more typically Applesque concision and concentrated humor.

Thus we now have The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press), Apple's first book of fiction in over twenty years. In many ways it certainly seems of a piece with Apple's previous work. His signature low-aggression comedy remains mostly intact, although it now seems less a variant of postmodernism than a kind of benevolent satire that registers the odd and the peculiar in human behavior, the strange turns taken in people's lives, without presuming to correct human folly or critique social convention. Neither is American culture skewered or subverted, even though the stories in The Jew of Home Depot also continue Apple's focus on shopping-mall America, on characters who want to meet Yao Ming, who own an auto salvage company, sell Star Wars swords, industrial equipment, have inherited a package goods store, work at Home Depot. These characters go about their daily business with utter sincerity, their activities and occupations assumed to be normal and ordinary, even if in the context of the stories related they seem unavoidably if amusingly off-center.

This slightly off-kilter tone is usually established at the beginning of an Apple story, as in "Stepdaughters":

My wife sits beside me on our new leather couch. Strength is between us. "Who would have ever thought of this," Helen says. "I worried about boys, not about male hormones."

Our family life had been serene and moving toward joyful until Stephanie began shot-putting. Her eight-pound steel ball is now hammering all three of us. Stephanie is training for the state meet; Helen is fighting for her daughter's female body, and perhaps her soul. I am stepfather number three trying to stay on the sidelines.

The conceit of stepdaughter-as-shot-putter is carried through the story in this same matter-of-fact style as the stepfather comes to feel by the end of story some solidarity with his goal-driven stepdaughter:

When she opens her eyes I am standing across the room imitating her stance. Stephanie laughs. "At least take off your tie," she says. "Nobody shot-puts in a tie."

Even before I begin my arm feels sore. My legs are fifty--I remember the insurance company table. I feel the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the statistical saga of a tired body that must gear itself up each day for a 150-pound throw against the darkness. Yet, I feel as filled with hope and prayer as she is.

Steph and I point our left feet at one another like swordsman in a Douglas Fairbanks movie.

"On three," she says. And we begin.

This conclusion full of "hope and prayer" seems to me to represent, on the other hand, a perceptible shift in Apple's fiction toward a more unambiguously affirmative outlook on the world, a tendency to accentuate possibility and purpose. Certainly Apple's fiction has never been a slough of Beckettian despond, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot do seem more generally optimistic, even celebratory. In "Proton Decay" and Sized Up" (the latter perhaps being the best story in the collection), the male protagonists wind up, in however unorthodox a fashion, looking forward to the marriages they have (presumably) arranged for themselves, while in "Peace," a businessman stuck with unsellable merchandise for which he has paid all the money he has is rescued when for the "International Day of Peace" a religious assemblage purchases the Star Wars swords, "freshly stamped 'Turn Star Wars into plougshares.'" Even "The Jew of Home Depot," which ends with an apparent murder and with the protagonist's alienation from his Orthodox Jewish background, has really chronicled his ultimate recognition of honest human desire.

Which is not to say these stories avoid grim realities or turn away from pain and suffering. A soldier about to be shipped to Iraq plays a role in "House of the Lowered," "Talker" involves a man raising his brain-damaged daughter, while both "Strawberry Shortcake" and "Adventures in Dementia" depict a son's struggle to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. The comedy in these stories, while not entirely abandoned, is notably dampened; their placement at the end of the volume additionally gives it a kind of sobriety we don't really find in his previous books. The stories in those books certainly were examples of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation" in contemporary fiction, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot seem to intensify this quality in Apple's fiction, although one could ask whether the corresponding loss of comedic subtlety is really a fair trade.

Also contributing to a perceived narrowing of focus in Apple's fiction is the fact that of the thirteen stories in the book, nine of them are narrated in the third-person, yet another departure from Apple's previous practice. Both of the earlier collections as well as Zip featured agreeable first-person narrators whose accounts of their experience, like that of the narrator of "Stepdaughters," added through their deadpan, slightly befuddled delivery an element that can't easily be approximated in a third-person narrative. And while Apple avoids facile "psychological realism"--the emphasis in these stories remains resolutely on what happens, not on how what happens is filtered through consciousness--the shift to third-person storytelling further suggests, to me at least, a less adventurous approach to the writing of fiction than might have been expected from Max Apple, especially after such an extended period of time during which to refresh one's sense of fiction's aesthetic possibilities.

It isn't that the book Apple has produced lacks all appeal. It is a diverting enough collection of stories. However, too many of them could have been written by other, ordinarily talented writers, and I had not previously thought of Max Apple as an ordinary talent.

First will come the costumes. The tailor will supply them all wholesale. He'll select the designs off-handedly and, with a few snips of the shears, will summon to life a predictable repertoire of gestures. See--scraps of fabric and thread in a circle of light, while all around is darkness. Out of the turmoil will emerge a fold of cloth, the germ of a tuck fastened with a pin. The tuck will create everything else. If it's sufficiently deep, it will call into existence a glittering watch chain on a protruding belly, labored breathing, and a bald head bedewed with perspiration. One thing leads to another.

One thing leads to another, not just in the tailor's work but in the work of fiction before us, the creation of which is being laid out much as the tailor lays out the cloth to cut. The narrative begins with the tailor, who is needed for that "predictable repertoire of gestures" his actions call forth, the marks of "character" to be found in the costumes worn. Additional items--a maid's dress, a notary's collar, a student's jacket, a general's uniform--are made, all for the "characters" who will later wear them as they play their roles in the story just beginning.

Soon the setting for this story, a city square, is introduced:

The place may look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city, where squares of this sort are encountered at very step amid the dense network of streets. But the vast whole to which this fragment belongs is not accessible. On each of the several streets connecting to the square, the pavement comes to an end just beyond the corner. Anyone who unduly trusts the solid look of the basalt cobbles and wishes to go elsewhere will immediately be mired in sandy excavations, amid the blank walls of apartment buildings, under windows drawn in chalk directly onto the plaster. Distant steeples and indistinct towers rise over the roofs and suggest the dimensions of the entirety of which this square is supposedly a part. Yet the whole itself must remain conjecture, as imponderable as accomplished facts or as forecasts of the future. Maintaining its substance and its walls and rooftops multiplied in real space would be impossible for me, and also unnecessary. In the meantime, the streetcar is already moving on its track. This will be the zero-line streetcar, the only line there is, and more than sufficient for the needs of a single square. Let the shape of the zero, unhurriedly described, accentuate the extraordinary qualities of the circle, a figure perfectly enclosed, whose whole is encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing.

On the one hand, it is relatively easy to evoke a sense of "realism." All that is needed is a flower bed fillled with "small yellow blooms," some "ornamental railings on the balconies and lace curtains in the windows," the "basalt cobbles." On the other, to extend this realism to the "vast whole" beyond the square and its provisional, self-enclosed existence is not worth the trouble, is impossible to maintain and of little value if the "world" as represented in a city square is as much world as the novelist needs to portray it in fiction. Like the zero-line streetcar, this aesthetic world can be "perfectly enclosed. . .encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing."

Soon enough, the characters themselves start making their appearances, characters such as the local policeman:

The policeman moves on as the streetcar continues its route around the square. How would that rather faded uniform sit on me? Maybe it would pinch under the arms? If I am the policeman, there was a time when I risked my neck in the trenches for the emblem that appears on my cap.

"I" is the narrative voice whose invocation of place and character we are witnessing as he/she/it brings the novel we are reading to "life." It should not be associated directly with the author but is instead a kind of character the author has created, a "novelist" whose job it is to bring together all of the elements that are needed to set the narrative into motion and keep it functioning. Sometimes this narrative voice conveys the story--or what is ultimately the story of the story--as a third-person narrator, outside all of the other characters and focusing on them one by one, but at times reconsiders the point of view and offers fragments related in the first person: "If I am the policeman. . ."; "If I am the notary's maid, on the second floor of the apartment building at number seven I take the vegetables out the basket. . ."; "If I am the notary, I shave with caution, and my hand never trembles. Before my eyes I can still see the blood I just wiped off the mirror, a reminder that my body is tired and all set to lower its tone." At times it is as if the narrator is leaving it up to us to decide whether we prefer the "inside" or the "outside" perspective, or, perhaps, whether in the end such a distinction is very meaningful.

Flaw relates what happens on this square over the course of a single day. And it is an eventful day. Most dramatically, a large group of "refugees" emerges from the streetcar and crowds into the square, to the extreme consternation of the local residents. Eventually the refugess are confined en masse in a cellar, but at the end of the day it is discovered that they have disappeared An Army general is disconcerted by this turn of events, reflecting that "What he ordered to be locked up should have remained so, period. . .The absence of the crowd is nothing but a special form of presence, and what has changed is in essence of secondary importance. Since the refugees are no longer here, they must be somewhere else, that much is obvious" The refugees seem to be a consequence of a coup that has taken place somewhere amid the "sandy excavations" outside the square but that we know about only through the rumors circulating through the square and that may have been connected to a loud explosion heard earlier in the day.

The novel ends with a reverie about what may have happened to the refugees if they had managed to make it to "America." The narrator concludes:

Happy endings are never happier than is possible. It might seem that, like a springtime thaw, they bring the promise of a new beginning, but the truth is otherwise. They merely lay bare the rotting matter of dashed hopes. Fortunate turns of events bring no relief, consumed as they are by the mold of unintentionally ironic meanings, and shot through with the musty despair of past seasons. And it is from them, these endings which end nothing, that new stories will grow.

One senses that the next day on this (presumably) East European square would unfold much like the day the novel has related, if not in detail then certainly in essence. That the novel has managed to convey this essence is perhaps a mark of its "success," but Flaw also seems to suggest that representing a bare essence of human existence is the best that fiction can do. By dramatizing the seat-of-the-pants process by which fiction is composed, highlighting the conventional signals of "setting" or "character" that guide our reading of fiction, disclosing the extent to which fiction is the active struggle to incorporate reality within an aesthetic scheme, not a completed account of reality, Flaw exposes the "flaw" in thinking that fiction can be a seamless represention of the real. It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact.

Ultimately the true success of Flaw is its dynamic--I would even say entertaining--performance of this internal drama about the act of fiction-making.

ADDENDUM Archipelago Books has without question become an indispensable source of translated fiction, but I wonder whether it would be possible to include with its volumes a preface or critical introduction, presumably by a scholar or critic familiar with the author's work and/or with that author's national literature. Such an introduction might be especially useful for readers curious about a writer like Tulli but who really have no context within which to place her work. In lieu of that, this interview with the translator of Flaw is available.

Marisa Silver's The God of War (Simon and Schuster) is yet another mediocre novel that unaccountably has sent reviewers into raptures of praise, larding it with adjectives such as "beautiful," "stunning," and "exquisite." Such praise for a thoroughly drab, utterly undistinguished work of complacent realism, a novel that reinforces the most retrograde notions of what a "serious" novel should be like, leaves one lamenting not just the persistence of the kind of formulaic "literary fiction" this novel represents, but also the inability of so many critics to evaluate this fiction in other than the most vapid, critically submissive terms.

The God of War is essentially a coming-of-age story, perhaps the most frequently invoked subgenre in the history of fiction. In order to justify yet another novel employing this plot convention, one would hope that its author would at least offer something more distinctive in the way of style or voice, something to enliven an otherwise familiar narrative (as done, for example in The Catcher in the Rye). But, unfortunately, Silver does not provide such aesthetic compensations. Even though she has chosen to let her protagonist tell his own story, the resulting narrative voice is at best bland and perfunctory. The story is told in retrospect, creating a tone of earnest detachment that fails to engage the reader with the narrator's younger self and makes his story read like an indifferent chronicle of the recent past: Here's what it was like in this small part of the world thirty years ago. When the narrator's language isn't just colorless, it strains after effect in badly wrought figures: "Her cheeks were puffy at the bottom as if she were storing two caramels or some other secrets there"; "The air felt exhausted, as if it had finally given up its day work and had flung its spent self across the land."

About the only plausibly original feature of The God of War is its setting on and around California's Salton Sea, a man-made body of water created as an accidental consequence of a water diversion project in the early 20th century. Here, enduring the stench of periodic fish and bird kills, among the detritus of failed efforts to make the area into a resort, and facing what is otherwise an unforgiving desert environment, the adolescent protagonist lives with his mother and his autistic brother. Clearly the elemental bleakness of the setting is meant to reinforce or counterpoint the boy's encounter with the harshness of life, but, considering the indistinct impression we get of the Salton Sea and its environs, the novel could just as well be set in any other struggling, off-the-beaten-track community where young people are forced early to confront adult problems. The peculiarities of the Salton Sea are summoned to provide a kind of exotic backdrop, but since we really learn very little either about it or about the way it has conditioned the lives of those who live near it, it ultimately does not play a very meaningful role in the story. It seems something of a gimmick, a way to differentiate this novel from all the other novels of "local color" competing for attention in the literary maketplace.

The story mostly concerns the narrator's efforts to protect his brother from those whose misperceptions might do him harm, including his own mother, whom the narrator feels never really accepted her autistic son's condition. (In an ironic twist, his younger brother winds up protecting the narrator from danger, although even here the latter finds it necessary to conceal his brother's responsibility for the act of violence involved.) The novel's core situation, single mother barely able to support herself and her two sons, one of whom is severely mentally disabled, provides inherent possibilities for both melodrama and sentimentality, and it doesn't fail to exploit most of them. It especially fails to avoid sentimentality, as almost every time the younger brother figures into a scene the reader's heartstrings get tugged:

. . .He didn't take his mouth from the straw the entire time he sucked, not even to breathe. There was no end to his appetite. He ate whatever food was offered to him even if he had just finished a huge meal. Laurel and I learned to tell him when he was done eating and we were expert at distracting him so that he could tear his mind away from the food and land on a new obsession for a while. More than any other of his traits, this hunger upset me, made me feel unaccountably mournful. It filled me with a great nostalgic sadness for lost things, the way a rich person might feel if he had to live as a pauper, always remembering the fancy cars and clothes of a bygone life. . . .

It is perhaps inevitable that such a character will evoke cheap emotion, but Silver does little to mitigate this effect. Indeed, her decision to include such a character in a novel narrated by a family member almost ensures sentimentality, and the final chapter relating the younger brother's premature death in a group home only lays on the sentiment more thickly, suggesting to me a deliberate strategy to create pathos and evoke pity.

In both its conventionality and its sentimentality, The God of War is representative of a certain kind of "literary fiction" that mainstream reviewers just can't seem to resist. Realistic, mostly humorless, but full of "human emotion," these novels seem to appeal to critics and some readers as adequately "serious" to be elevated above popular potboilers and genre fiction, without violating the presumed need to be "accessible." They shield these critics and readers from more formally and thematically challenging fiction, which can be safely marginalized, and thus ignored. As long as the "literary" in "literary fiction" continues to be associated with novels like The God of War, the word will become only more accurately defined by such other words as "tedium" and "pretense."

In this interview, William Gaddis scholar Steven Moore says of populist attacks on experimental writers that

Of course you don't have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

I couldn't help but detect some laziness as well; some people don't want to “work” at reading a novel (or listening to a complex opera, or watching a film with subtitles, etc). I said earlier I liked a challenge; many people obviously don’t, or not when it comes to novels. I got the sense from these critics that they feel the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel (and their readers) by trying to turn it into something (high art) it was never intended to be. . . .

I don't think I'd call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction "anti-intellectualism." Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can't be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It's more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it requires. It's less "laziness" than it is a fundamental suspicion of anything that isn't useful in a readily apparent way. Critics want novels to be useful as tools of cultural analysis, while ordinary readers want novels to be entertaining, an escape from their own everyday reality.

Nor do I think that this impatience is necessarily "in step" with right-wing cultural values. The radical left can be just as impatient with art that isn't useful to their political battles as the radical right. In fact, the political left is probably more hostile to the "merely aesthetic," which is taken to be an expression of bad faith when it isn't being deconstructed and shown to be ideologically complicit with the political right. It isn't necessary to associate resistance to challenging art with politically conservative attitudes in order to account for its existence.

What may account for it, however, is precisely the assumption Moore detects in many readers and critics that "the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel." This is an assumption held not just by critics and readers, but by some writers as well, writers who shape their work so that "anyone should be able to enjoy" it, who count themselves failures if their work doesn't reach the broadest audience possible, who are willing to take on themselves the roles of marketer and publicist in order to accomplish this task. It is an assumption that counts novels as just another transitory amusement in competition for the entertainment dollar.

In his book The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt convincingly establishes that the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class were parallel developments and that this correlation was not just incidental. Novels did pose an opportunity for this now literate social class to exercise its newly-acquired skill. But to insist that novels should (or could, considering the other entertainment options now available) continue to perform this same function 200 years later, after Flaubert, after Henry James, and after all the other writers in their wake who saw that the novel could indeed be "high art," can only be an effort to put the genie back in the bottle. To this extent, the distinction between "popular fiction" and "literary fiction" is quite sensible. Let those who prefer a "democratic" form of mass entertainment stay with the kind of books that dominate the best seller lists. Let those who prefer "challenging" fiction with claims to high art stay with the comparatively few such works that manage to get published. The two groups don't have to intermingle at all.

I don't really mind being identified with the "elitist" group. Nor do I mind that the larger group wants fiction without artistic pretensions. I only mind when writers or readers want it both ways, when they want their books to be "good reads" but also want them to be taken seriously as works of literary art. This usually involves dismissing "high art" standards as "narrow" and elevating popular standards to a place higher than high art. Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity's Rainbow don't "betray" the novel. They confirm its possibilities. To deny that the novel has such possibilities is the real betrayal.

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Starcherone Books) would seemingly qualify as a "novel" only if we define the form in the barest possible terms: a lengthy composition in prose. Puporting to be a decoded translation of a series of "extra" episodes of The Odyssey (decoded because, according to the translator, who provides an introduction to the book that has now been made of them, they have existed as an encrypted manuscript the means of decrypting which has only recently been discovered), it bears no resemblance to the sort of unified narrative most readers expect to find in a novel. There is no plot other than the preexisting plot of the Odyssey, on which the "lost books" perform multiple variations. Similarly, while Odysseus is presumably the protagonist (if it isn't the "translator"), many different versions of Odysseus, assuming many different roles, are presented in the 46 episodes comprising The Lost Books. The stories are told from many different points of view, both first-person and third-person (one of the most affecting of the tales is told by the Cyclops, lamenting his blindness at the hands of Odysseus (and for whom he expresses great hatred)), and while one might read the tales simply as a collection of stories, this would rob them of the coherence they ultimately attain as a set of imaginative supplements to the Odyssey narrative--taken together, they form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an implicit commentary on the Homeric version of the story achieved by highlighting its elisions and sounding out its interstices.

Such a strategy does require some familiarity on the reader's part with the Odyssey itself, since the effects created by this sort of rewriting and rearranging to an extent do depend on our recognition that an episode from Homer's text has been recast--Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his people "all astonishment and delight" and Penelope dead, Achilles abandons the Green encampment to do good works in the world, perhaps to spend "a year in contemplation in the shadow of a tree"--or a character or episode has been enhanced or freshly emphasized. While it is certainly possible that the reader only minimally acquainted with both The Iliad and The Odyssey would still find Mason's alternative versions diverting enough, the humor and the wit embodied in Mason's counter-narratives, as well as the cleverness of their construction, will surely strike the Odyssey-literate with more force and efficacy than those who know Homer's epic only in its barest outlines, if at all. By no means is The Lost Books of the Odyssey a book to be enjoyed only by classicists, but it helps to be a reader with an interest in literature, and The Odyssey's role in its history, that overshadows whatever interest most readers of novels profess to have in encountering "real life" in fiction.

Despite these potential obstacles to a broad audience for a book like The Lost Books of the Odyssey, it is, in my opinion, nevertheless a work of "experimental" fiction that many readers would find enjoyable if they were to give it a chance. Not only are many of the invented episodes entertaining in their own right, but gradually one comes to anticipate what new twist on the Odysseus story Mason will offer, in a way that is almost analogous to the pleasurable anticipation readers feel when looking forward to the next turn of plot in a conventional narrative. Equally rewarding is the opportunity to reflect further on the Homeric themes of war, honor, leadership, and sacrifice, which, if anything, are accentuated even more intensely (if at times ironically) through the liberties taken with the story of the Trojan War (e.g., the chapter narrated by Odysseus that begins, "I have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am") and through the parallels that might be drawn between this re-told Odyssey and our own ongoing, ill-conceived war. The Borgesian frame provided by the translator's introduction and an appendix relating the history of the lost books contributes an additional tongue-in-cheek element that completes the novel's masquerade as a feat of "scholarship."

For me, the most successful works of experimental fiction always "entertain," even when they reject or subvert the usual devices conventionally considered the source of fiction's ability to entertain--the devices that create "compelling characters," dramatic narratives, "vivid" settings, etc. (Gilbert Sorrentino's novels provide a good example of this ability to entertain while dispensing with the standard accoutrements of entertainment.) In experimental fiction of the postmodern kind, this is frequently accomplished through comedy and satire. In the case of The Lost Books of the Odyssey it is achieved through what might simply be called ingenuity, along with a certain amount of chutzpah. This may or may not be an approach all readers can appreciate, but I found this novel a pleasure to read nevertheless, and I highly recommend it.

It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that "experimental" writers (and the critics who champion them) have little regard for the kind of fiction that preceded them, that they simply deny the continued aesthetic value of what has come before. But I think most experimental or unconventional writers have a relationship to the past that is captured by these words from John Dewey in Art as Experience:

When the old has not been incorporated, the outcome is merely eccentricity. But great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression.

Writers like William Gass or John Barth or Robert Coover have always been at pains to make clear they consider their own work to be extensions of past practice, part of the very tradition their fiction otherwise seems to be challenging. Barth especially found inspiration for his "postmodern" work in such 18th century forms as the picaresque and epistolary novel, as well as in Greek and Arabic literature, while Gass's essays frequently pay tribute to writers of the past. By "digesting" literary history, these writers both nourish their own talents by heightening the "conflict set up between [tradition] and what is new in themselves," thereby discovering "a new mode of expression," and help to bring a usable literary past into the present. This is not so much Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" as it is a necessary sounding of literary tradition in order to find one's own proper place within it.

Certainly there are "eccentric" writers whose work seems merely strange, even incomprehensible, because an enabling context--to what convention is this device responding, to meet what known goal has that strategy been used--is missing. Such works lack the "tension" Dewey speaks of, and the effort to read them is mostly frustrating rather than creatively challenging. But I would guess that most writers of innovative fiction set out to create fiction as good as that which they've admired as readers. To do so requires more than imitation. It requires finding the means adequate to "a new mode of expression" that perhaps will measure up to those already to be found in the great works of the past. Ultimately it requires an effort equal to that Dewey ascribes to the "great innovators in modern painting," who "were more assiduous students of the pictures of the past than were the imitators who set the contemporary fashion."

In his essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the novel in its "classic" phase:

All the technical elements of the narrative--systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.--everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent.

He continues:

But then, with Flaubert, everything begins to vacillate. A hundred years later the whole system is no more than a memory, and it is to that memory, to that dead memory, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered. . . .

It is tempting to say that Robbe-Grillet's account of the 19th century novel and the shadow it cast on subsequent novelists still seems relevant, fifty years later, and that many readers still think of the "innocent" narrative as the novel's natural form, from which any variation or experiment in form is merely a temporary departure. However, an honest consideration of Robbe-Grillet's bill of particulars would have to conclude that fiction over the course of the 20th century did in fact move beyond the model Robbe-Grillet associates with Balzac and other early novelists.

While much current fiction does continue to employ third-person narration--usually the "free indirect" variant through which a character's thoughts, recollections, and emotions provide a perceptual matrix but are not directly stated by the character--first-person narratives are probably more prevalent than ever before, as are experiments in shifting, alternate, and multiple points of view. Similarly, stories related in the present tense have become so common that what was once a notable divergence from the norm is probably no longer noticed by most readers. And while most novels still rely on "plot," their plots are by no means always "linear," such chronological development as they possess often enough supplied by the reader after piecing together the fragments of narrative presented without much immediate regard for chronological continuity. It could perhaps be argued that too many novels do still imply a "decipherable universe"--decipherable insofar as it can be adequately rendered through the protocols of realism--but most literary fiction is not so tied to a 19th century worldview as to portray human experience as "stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal."

Indeed, to the extent that contemporary life seems to many of us discontinuous and indefinite, the modernist-derived strategies emphasizing subjectivity and fragmentation seem justified in the name of realism itself. And to this extent, Robbe-Grillet has been proven correct when in the same essay he predicts that this sort of modernist experimentation (with which he more or less associated his own fiction) will become "assimilated," viewed by critics still attuned only to the past as the most recent golden age of storytelling. Thus, esteemed critics such as James Wood point us back to Henry James or Virginia Woolf as writers who set a standard of inner-directed realism, a realism of the mind and its subjective perceptions rather than a realism of the material world presented as a collection of facts. Wood is certainly not alone in holding up the psychological novel as the apogee of the novel as a literary form. The notion that in fiction, and only in fiction, we can "get inside" a character, can "feel" what it's like to negotiate the world from a perspective other than our own, is very widespread. But, I would argue, this is because one part of the modernist project, the extension of realism into "psychological realism," has been successful, while that part setting a prececent for aesthetic innovation ("make it new") as a measure of artistic achievement has not been embraced as firmly by either writers or critics. The set of accepted conventions for the writing of fiction has been advanced from about 1825 to about 1925, but those voices that "seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered" to a "dead system" can still be heard, even if that "system" has incorporated some of the strategies for which Robbe-Grillet himself was an advocate.

Although "innocent" novels are still being written (particularly within some forms of genre fiction), very few serious writers have failed to notice fiction's loss of innocence. But the expansion of techniques available to the modern writer has developed into its own kind of "systematic" practice that can be just as stubborn an obstacle to the development of a "new novel" as the traditonal story form Robbe-Grillet wanted to clear away. It is probably inevitable that strategies and approaches once regarded as mold-breaking will eventually become conventional, established techniques for the novelist to adopt when they suit his/her need. But this only makes it more important that writers like Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino emerge to point out that such techniques have become hidebound and to offer fresh alternatives.

. . .one looks at this stuff published daily and has to say helplessly that Dickens and O’Connor and Faulkner have nothing on this. Stephen King could do no better in calling up the bizarre extremes of human existence. No wonder contemporary readers have little taste for fiction, and novelists feel compelled to present their fictions as spurious memoir. With a world as it already is beyond all imagining, what role for the writer who wants to imagine what is not.

This is remeniscent of Philip Roth's essay from the early 1960s in which he too lamented the fact that truth is often stranger than fiction:

. . .the American writer. . .has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of Amerian reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

There is certainly much truth in these observations, and if we conceive of the fiction writer's task as one by which the writer depicts a set of characters and events that transcend ordinary reality in their extremity, evokes a landscape that strikes us as intensely strange yet still faithful to "actuality," then perhaps fiction cannot compete with reality. But is this the writer's task? Should fiction be in competition with reality in a search for the "bizarre extremes of human existence"?

In its way, the notion that fiction should be engaged in such a search only reinforces the underlying idea that realism is the novel's natural mode, that the novel exists to "record" reality, even if it is reality in its most outrageous manifestations. If William Dean Howells believed that the novel provided an opportunity to record the ordinary course of human reality, the 21st century realist may choose to portray that reality through its outliers, its most outlandish displays of human behavior, but the goal, to re-present "reality" as it is lived (by someone), remains the same. Peter qualifies his own conclusions about the difficulty of the writer's job by adding that "Imagination isn’t just an effort to invoke the extreme, but to shape it, to tame it to a tale," but while this begins to consider the art involved in fiction's confrontation with reality ("to shape it"), it finally equates that art with pruning and trimming, with taking the edge off reality (or maybe sharpening it) rather than creating something new--an addition to reality rather than a meticulously groomed version of it.

All fiction begins in reality--where else could it begin?--but why must it end merely in offering a plausible version of "real life"? Is the goal of writing fiction to lure back those readers so obsessed with the superficial appearance of reality that they've turned to memoir? Writers of fiction ought to take the opportunity to transfigure and re-imagine the real rather than just describe it. More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of "human existence." The writer's job is to "imagine what is not" first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven't yet been made to do.

baffled and amazed by authors who do not see marketing as part of their jobs. First off, is there really a job description for authors? If so, please forward to me as I have a few holes in my resume and I’m too lazy to do the work myself. Second, what planet are you living on? Very, very few authors have the luxury of not engaging in marketing. And even they have to do talk show appearances or “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”.

Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. Admittedly, publishers now do a terrible job, not just of marketing, but of judging talent, editing, and nourishing careers. Indeed, they're terrible at all the jobs writers once thought defined the very word, "publisher." That writers ceded editorial control to the publishers was the devil's bargain they had to strike with modern capitalism, something they had to exchange in order to get matters of business taken care of. I suppose that, in the wake of the violation of this deal on the part of publishers, writers who still want the benefits accompanying the bargain--placement in bookstores, reviews in important newspapers, etc.--might be forced to do both the writing and the selling, but I don't see why they should have known this would be part of their job, and I certainly don't know why they would continue to regard mainstream publishers as the arbiters of "success." If these publishers are not publishing their books with any care, if they're dropping them after the first book flops (due mostly to the publisher's own incompetence), and if they're going to force writers to do all the grunt work, anyway, what earthly reason do writers have to endure the situation and submit themselves to such humiliations?

Now, I know that Kassia has the best interests of writers in mind. And I also know that if the publishing of fiction were to move farther toward self-publishing as a viable mode, the need for writers to become marketers and promoters would no doubt become even more acute. But it's the publishers themselves who have brought things to this pass, and it won't do to let them off the hook by claiming they're "book-focused" rather than "author-focused" and noting they're "juggling hundreds, maybe thousands of authors." If they've let their business practices spiral out of control, whose fault is that, exactly? Should we really compound this failure by now chastising those writers who haven't yet gotten with the new program and become their own publicists? The "marketing" crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?

Kassia concludes by urging us to accept the new paradigm in which "the author as a business" holds equal place with "the writer as a creative being." Given we live in a culture that post-Reagan capitalism has transformed into one that is "all-business, all-the-time," acceding to the new paradigm might be inevitable, resisting it futile. Acquiescing to the notion that "Marketing might be a distraction for a writer, but. . .essential if you’re an author" may well be necessary to "succeed" in the brave new world avaricious publishers have created, but one might still hope that some people will choose to be writers nevertheless, and let the authors be damned.

Regardless of whether his own novels will stand up as important instances of "a new departure," Alain Robbe-Grillet thoroughly understood what it would take for the novel to survive as a credible art form:

There is no question. . .of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardize them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction. Once the work is completed, the writer's critical reflection will serve him further to gain a perspective in regard to it, immediately nourishing new explorations, a new departure. ("The Use of Theory," in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard)

So much for the notion that "The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres. . .and pouring new wine into old skins." This may be the "test" for a certain kind of commercially-minded writer, the "professional author," but as Robbe-Grillet explains, the writer who truly takes his/her form seriously is willing not only to reject the "old skins" but also to discard the "new wine" once it has been made. Continuing to use the same "recipe" only shuts down the process of "continual reflection" on the possibilities of fiction needed to keep it vital. What has already been done--by the writer, by previous writers--however much it might continue to please readers, for the writer serves ultimately as the motivation for "new explorations," without which the novel will devolve into mere product and survive only as an historical curiosity. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," writes Robbe-Grillet elsewhere in this essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future."

Everything that keeps our current literary culture mired in midddlebrow mediocrity is exemplified in Amy Bloom's novel, Away, and its reception by mainstream book reviewers when it was published last fall. The novel itself is not per se a "bad" novel--many worse ones are published and reviewed every season--but it is entirely undistinguished, to the point that my most immediate reaction to it was to wonder why it needed to exist in the first place. Moreover, that book reviewers would so exorbitantly praise such a novel, as in fact most of them did, strongly calls into question the standards being applied by those working in that branch of "literary journalism" represented by newspaper book sections. If Away is considered by "professional" book reviewers to be an exemplary work of serious literary fiction, which my reading of the reviews leads me to think is the case, then as a culture attuned to the possibilities of fiction as literary art, we are in a sad state indeed.

Amy Bloom's new novel, "Away," could be called formulaic. Her protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is on a quest of the most classic variety: to be reunited with her young daughter, lost in a Russian pogrom. Yet. . ."Away" testifies to the truism that execution is all. Bloom isn't fighting traditional forms; in some respects her second novel is one more standard American immigration tale. But her execution is exquisite. . . .

Later she adds:

Bloom breaks no new formal ground, yet not a line is trite nor a character stereotypical. Working comfortably within a conventional form, she renews and redeems it. The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres -- the love story, the ghost story, the immigration story -- and pouring new wine into old skins. . . .

Shriver's review reeks of the kind of rationalization book reviewers constantly offer when recommending "formulaic" fiction written "comfortably within a conventional form." Such fiction may otherwise seem "standard" in its use of all of the hand-me-down practices of traditional narrative, but it's still full of "finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details," as Shriver puts it a few paragraph later. It may be utterly predictable, reinforcing safe and complacent reading habits by going no farther than to pour some "new wine into old skins," but if its "execution is exquisite," then no more should be asked of it. Who needs fiction that challenges formal expectations, offers an alternative to our hackneyed notions of "finely wrought prose"? Writers who pursue such challenges and alternatives are just "game-playing," anyway, so why not just settle for another feel-good novel and its "soft-smile, along-the-way humor."

Away is in fact just what Shriver initially judges it to be: a tired piece of formula fiction rehashing familiar themes of immigrant stories that cannot be redeemed by its "colorful" characters" or its "soft-smile" humor. In fact, both the characters and the "humor" with which their stories are larded seem only more cloying for the obvious effort being made to use them to inflate an inherently cliched narrative--a mother treks her way across the continent to be reunited with her child--into something less sentimental and more "vivid." Unfortunately, the vividness of the characters is almost entirely a result of their being enlisted in the attempt to justify retelling a "standard" story that otherwise has no real justification. As the novel's protagonist, Lillian, meets up with these characters--a homosexual actor, a black prostitute, an isolated telegraphist in the Yukon, etc.--the narrative becomes only more labored and the characters themselves only more an obvious effort to compensate for the fact the Lillian is essentially a cipher. It's hard finally to care much about her journey, or about the people she meets along the way, since she is so resolutely a blank slate on which these melodramatic adventures are being written--which is not, I don't think, the role for Lillian the author intended.

In her review of the book, Heather McAlpin observes that "Away is a compact epic, an adventure story, a survival tale and an incredible journey wrapped up in a historical novel cloaked in a love story. It evokes E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime in its playful fusion of fiction and fantasy and its exuberant tone. . . . " I don't know if Doctorow could have foreseen the influence Ragtime (as well as his subsequent historical novels) would have on writers following him, but contemporary fiction has indeed become inundated with novels whose primary purpose, or at least so it seems to me, is to "recreate" the past. If Away has any reason for being at all, this is it, to recreate a period of early 20th century American history (with the requisite allowance made for the "local color" as necessary literary device). Since I have frequently indicated my impatience with this sort of historical fiction--in which no other aesthetic purpose beyond evoking an historical event or period can be discerned--I will not dwell on its shortcomings here exept to note that Away is apparently based on historical fact, gleaned from several historical and autobiographical sources Bloom lists in her acknowledgments page, although "reconfigured. . .when it suited the story" (Author's Note). That reviewers would still be welcoming this sort of thing over thirty years after Ragtime, would even extol its virtues in the hyperbolic language used to praise Away, seems to me to indicate an even more impoverished attitude toward fiction's potential to continue to surprise than that illustrated in Amy Bloom's decision to write such a novel.

In what she apparently considers praise for Bloom's writing, Shriver exclaims that Bloom "conjures the kind of specific details that creative-writing teachers are eternally begging their students to generate." However, it is precisely Bloom's "finely wrought" prose, cut to fit the sort of default narrative realism encouraged by creative writing programs (or any other kind of systematic writing instruction) that makes Away seem so perfunctory, so indistinguishable from all the other manufactured works of narrative realism produced--with a few acceptable variations--according to a preconceived model of what a "well-made" novel should be like. That a novel like Away would be widely reviewed and favorably received is probably not surprising, since book reviewers, may of them "creative-writing teachers" themselves, generally seem to accept this model as well. But American fiction is not well-served when book review pages (the few of them that are left) give over so much of their space, and so little critical judgment, to such backward-looking, unimaginative work. Perhaps it is too much to ask that the editors of these pages more often consider art over commerce, the interests of literature over the interests of the status quo, but must they so consistently valorize the mediocre?

As someone who would probably be associated with promoting the sort of novel being described here, I nevertheless have to say I find Alan Massie's evocation of the "self-enclosed novel" mostly incomprehensible:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. . .By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

I really have no idea what it would mean for a work of fiction to make "no reference. . .to anything beyond itself." It would at the least require that such a work be written in an invented language--and thus have no audience beyond the author him/herself--a language that would carry none of the "references" that English carries simply by being a historical language spoken by billions of people. And even if such a thing could be done, the invented language itself would have to make no reference to the "world of fact" its author would nonetheless still inhabit, presumably focusing entirely on an alternative "world of fact" that somehow only the author has ever experienced. This would indeed be quite a feat of self-isolation, and the resulting fiction would be cordoned off both from the actual "world of fact" and everyone inhabiting it, but the notion that some writers do this, or try to do it, is, of course, resolutely absurd.

In suggesting that certain fiction does "not appear to be set in time," Massie must mean that it does not directly refer to either current events as described by journalists or past events as related by historians. There's no other way to understand the bizarre claim that some novels want to deny "that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters." Since all humans live in the world of fact and are subjected to the "winds of the world," and since writers are themselves human, the stories and novels they write bear all the marks of that wind, even if some writers are less concerned with charting it directly than other writers.

Presumably a story like Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" is the sort of thing Massie has in mind (although he gives no examples at all of the sort of thing he does have in mind). Or a novel such as Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association. "The Balloon" is an obvious fantasy, in which an infinitely expandable hot-air balloon is inflated until it spreads out and covers all of New York City. The story records the way the city's people adapt to and come to understand this "phenomenon": "There was a certain amount of argumentation about the 'meaning' of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena." Massie no doubt objects to the way in which a "self-enclosed" fiction like this casts doubt on "meaning," portrays meaning as something always up for grabs. But who could assert that this story rejects "the world of fact"? It is all about New York City, a "fact" that informs every line and paragraph. It's about New Yorkers, whose residence in the city most assuredly "influence[s] their behaviour" and "affect[s] the course of their lives."

The Universal Baseball Association is about as "self-enclosed" as a novel can get. It takes place completely inside the head of a man playing a game of fantasy baseball. He has created an entire league and invested it with a glorious past. He further invests it with a life-and-death significance that culminates in a horrible accident that tears his world (the baseball world) apart. Ultimately the novel is a kind of meditation on the interplay of fantasy and reality (the "world of fact" represented most obviously by baseball, a very real pastime in whose intricacies millions of people do become entangled), but it does subject its protagonist, however indirectly, to the "winds of the world." Those winds "impinge" on J. Henry Waugh in a particularly destructive way. He wants to be the God of his invented world, but the real world of chance and human imperfection intervenes nevertheless.

Massie essentially uses the distinction he draws between "self-enclosed" and "open" fiction to marginalize the former as "merely literary," while lauding the former for its willingness to "take on" history, "the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives." In Massie's view, the open novel "was invented more or less by Walter Scott," whose novels for Massie are exemplars of the kind of fiction that is "open" to the currents of reality. But I think he has it exactly backward. It's fiction like "The Balloon" and UBA that depicts the forces of "contingency" through exercises of the imagination, while writers of historical and "documentary" fiction are stuck with what was and what is. Self-enclosed fiction is actually "open" to any and all kinds of aesthetic innovation, while the "open" novel is closed to all but the most conventional approaches that allow the "world of fact" to predominate.

The important distinction to be made is not between "self-enclosed" and "open" works of fiction. It is between those works whose authors think of fiction as primarily an aesthetic form and those who think of it as a form of commentary on human behavior or the state of the the world, on "the world of harsh political fact" or some such thing. If you want to think of the latter kind of fiction as more "open," more "engaged" with facts and thus more relevant to your concerns as a reader, so be it. Some readers are impatient with art and want their novels to be like sociology only with stories, or like journalism with better stories. But this is no justification for defining a whole other kind of fiction almost out of existence and distorting it beyond recognition in the process.

In a series of posts about director Frank Tashlin and one of his early films, Son of Paleface, Ray Davis writes of the film's star, Bob Hope:

Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal, tethered by rude tugs of slapstick and abuse. The Marx and Ritz Brothers drive reality squealing like a moneylender from the temple. Approaching sometimes the misanthropic babble of Groucho and sometimes the nightmarish openness of Fields, Hope is the first movie comedian to attain enlightenment by the road of skepticism: an absolute distrust that undercuts narrative drive, filmic convention, and his own part. On the other hand, he's not a delicate instrument; like a cartoon star, you know that if a bomb dropped on Hope, he'd be nervously wise-cracking in Hell next scene.

I agree with Ray entirely. In the great tradition of American slapstick comedy (what I also like to think of as a tradition of "carnivalesque" comedy as described by M.M. Bakhtin), Bob Hope is one of its most important figures, and perhaps the figure most unjustly left out of critical considerations of this tradition. Ray captures his "carnivalesque" qualities precisely: "an absolute distrust" of everything "serious" that informs all of his best films, right down to a distrust of his own role in the film. Not all of the jokes in all of the films work equally well--certainly not as consistently as those in the Marx Brothers films--but as a "movie comedian" his persona is just as acerbic as the other comedians Ray mentions and his best film work just as rewarding. (It must be admitted that he did make more bad films than most of the other great screen comics, especially later in his career, but his early work still holds up.)

Some viewers might object to Hope's films based on a dislike of his conservative political views. But, as with Charlton Heston, such viewers should reconsider the extremely tenuous connection between those views expressed offscreen and Hope's considerable skills as a skeptical comedian.

Charlton Heston's political descent into right-wing crankery never really made me think less of his films--at least his better ones--just as Alec Baldwin's liberal activism doesn't make me think more highly of his. (Or, for that matter, make me value Heston's films of the 50s and 60s, when he was himself a Hollywood liberal, more than those he made during and after his political conversion.) Whether actors choose to exploit their celebrity status in order to promote favored political causes is ultimately of little interest to me, although I certainly reserve the right to find their political views obnoxious, as I often did find Heston's.

Unfortunately, Heston was for the most part a rather wooden actor, so it's only in a handful of cases that one has to make the effort to separate the work from the man to begin with. Most of Heston's bad films (and there are many) fail because of poor scripts and/or his own undistinguished performances. Moreover, in some of his better films their success comes at least as much from the compensatory skills of the director (Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah) or from a fortuitous match between role and Heston's impassivity as an actor (the various spectacles with which he is most closely identified). One remembers that Heston was in these films, but it is not his skills as an actor that make them memorable.

A significant exception to this pattern is Will Penny (1969), a relatively overlooked Western that depends entirey on Heston's sensitive portrayal of the eponymous protagonist, an aging cowboy who suddenly finds himself forming a family with a stranded married woman trying to make her way to California along with her young son. While Heston's previous "strong, silent" characers were laconically heroic, larger-than-life figures, Will Penny, though equally laconic and with his own kind of inner strength, is a modest, in some ways nondescript man mostly concerned just with surviving from season to season. Heston manages to find both the strength and the vulnerability in this man, and although the film creates considerable emotional resonance, it does not sentimentalize Will Penny and his circumstances, primarily because Heston manages to make the character's guilelessness, his essential innocence, seem genuine.

Will Penny probably belongs among the other "revisionist" Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s (The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Ulzana's Raid), in which the conventionally heroic view of the American West, complete with gunslingers and persevering ranchers, was subjected to vigorous critique. In this case, the West is depicted as a place of hardship for those trying to extract a living from the land, the landscape itself rather bleak and blighted, including by those inhabiting the landscape, such as Quint (played by Donald Pleasance), a lunatic preacher who with his depraved sons stalk Will Penny almost to his death. Will Penny himself seems a revisionist Western hero, an unassuming, instinctively nonviolent character who even when he rides off into the sunset at the end of the film does so less as a gesture of rugged individualism than as a consequence of his own self-understanding--as much as he loves both the woman (played by Joan Hackett) and her son, as much as a settled life might appeal to him, he knows that he is too old and too habituated to his cowboying existence to adapt and that the woman, Catherine, should not be asked to sacrifice her marriage for a life as difficult as that she would share with him.

Heston manages to convey Will Penny's struggle to resolve his own conflicting impulses--to live an ordinary family life and to be honest with himself and the woman he loves--with affecting authenticity. Indeed, his performance is probably all the more convincing because of our association of Charlton Heston with Hollywood-style heroes of great determination if little depth. Will Penny seems to allow Heston to express facets of his talent his other roles forced him to suppress. In the process, Heston's performance in Will Penny helps to de-mythologize both the Western hero in particular and the Hollywood image of masculinity more generally. I don't know for sure what the later NRA President would have thought of this, but his opinion isn't really important, anyway.

At Costanza Book Club, Pacifist Viking asserts that when watching tv or movies "what sticks in my memory are not necessarily the ideas, but the aesthetic of the work," but when it comes to literature, "I'm not sure how I read different types of writing differently. I'm not sure my mind is operating differently whether I'm reading literature (poetry, drama, or fiction), history, theology, philosophy, criticism, essays, any remotely serious writing: I'm not entirely sure there's a difference in the way I read."

This attitude toward reading is probably not uncommon (everything gets smashed together as "serious writing" and then mined for "ideas"), and the contrast between what PV looks for in visual media and what he looks for in books also betrays a no doubt common assumption about the "aesthetic": it's fine when it means noting "the beautiful image" in works no one would take seriously for their "ideas" to begin with, when pretty pictures and "colorful" characters can substitute for content in otherwise content-less entertainments, but where "serious writing" is concerned it becomes embarassing, "merely" aesthetic. Thus PV's rejection of aestheticism, whereby the "primary" focus becomes "on the aesthetic at the expense of the content."

To me it's telling that when insisting he does nevertheless have respect for the aesthetic qualities of literature, PV appeals to Paradise Lost as an example: "I adore Paradise Lost. I love the content and I love the ideas. But I also love the imagery Milton conjures. I love his poetry. I could spend a long time analyzing and discussing his art in the epic poem. It's a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry. It's a poem so rich in both art and content that I rather think it transcends any meaningful separation between the art and the ideas." Paradise Lost certainly is "a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry," but it's also a poem in which it's actually quite easy to separate the "art" from the "content," since few people who read the poem now can have much sympathy for its defense of Puritan theology--which is the only "idea" I can find in the poem-- as anything more than a historical curiosity. One loves Paradise Lost precisely because it is such an aesthetically powerful work despite its rather repellent "idea" of Christianity. It's the first work I think of when challenged to provide an example of a work of literature in which art trumps content.

PV doesn't want to let go of the belief that in literature one finds "education and edification." Perhaps this is why he is willing to leave it jumbled up with "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Literature, like these other forms, is good for you, while the diversions provided by films and tv shows can be acceptably relegated to the "aesthetic." As I read PV's post, it seems to me that he has the most trouble separating prose fiction from the other kinds of "serious writing," perhaps because both poetry and drama exhibit their aesthetic natures somewhat more immediately. Prose fiction is less able to differentiate itself from the discursive methods of these other, non-literary forms; sometimes it imitates those methods directly. But this is no reason to collapse the differences between fiction and "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Indeed, there's all the more reason to maintain the separation, to allow fiction to explore the possibilities of verbal art in ways that aren't so plainly visible.

In a previous post, I expressed my puzzlement at Peter Brooks's view, articulated in his book Realist Vision, that the 19th century "is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable 'industrial novel,' one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its 'roman social,' including popular socialist varieties." I wondered why

a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art.

As it turns out, maintaining an analysis of realism that emphasizes "taking on" social problems as a defining characteristic requires a skeptical attitude toward the literary art of two of realism's ostensible founding figures, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. Brooks writes of Dickens's Hard Times, perhaps his own most concentrated portrayal of the social conditions of Victorian England:

By its play on the streets and surfaces of Coketown, the narratorial prose upholds that ideal evoked in the allusion to the Arabian Nights: the play of fancy, of metaphor, of magic and the conterfactual. The narratorial language is constantly saying to Coketown, as to Gradgrind and company, I am not prisoner of your system, I can transform it, soar above it, through the imaginative resources of my prose.

This is Brooks's ultimate judgment on Dickens as a writer who evokes the surfaces of realistic description, at times soars above them, but doesn't really grapple with the "issues" behind them: he writes too much. As Brooks puts it a little later, Dickens engages in "the procedure of turning all issues, facts, conditions, into questions of style." Rather than acknowledging that "Everything in the conditions of Coketown. . .cry out for organization of the workers," Dickens just plays his grandiose language games. He makes "the questions posed by industrialism too much into a trope."

For Brooks, Hard Times is not so much a "taking on" of the harsh realities of 19th century England but a retreat from them into. . .literature. Dickens doesn't attempt the politically-directed representation of these forces but instead the "nonrepresentation of Coketown in favor of something else, a representation of imaginative processes at work, a representation of transformative style at play on the world." It is difficult at times in reading this chapter to remember that Brooks intends such words as criticism. The "representation of imaginative processes at work" that Brooks describes here has always seemed to me one of the glories of Dickens's fiction.

Brooks gestures at granting Dickens his artistic preferences, but it's pretty clear from his discussion of Hard Times that he doesn't value these preferences in the same way he values fiction "that takes on the problems of social misery and class confict," or at least that does so without turning them into tropes. Certainly Brooks doesn't want to admit Dickens's fiction, with its out-of-control "narratorial prose" and its stubborn insistence on imagination, into the club of respectable realism.

With Flaubert, Brooks is less impatient with his style per se but still essentially accuses Flaubert of writing too much--of being preoccuped with writing, in this case of being fixated on structure and on detail ("le most juste"). According to Brooks:

. . .it may be precisely in this disciplining of his imagination to something he loathes that the arduous perfection of Madame Bovary is forged. There is nothing natural about this novel. It is absolutely the most literary of novels, Henry James said--which he did not mean entirely as praise. There is indeed something labored about the novel, its characters, plot, milieux are all contructed with effort. Everything, as Flaubert understands it, depends on the detail.

Flaubert's insistence on detailed description makes Brooks think that Madame Bovary "is the one novel, among all novels, that deserves the label 'realist'," but this conclusion does not leave him sanguine. Flaubert's sort of realism is too insular, too much the excuse for building an elaborate aesthetic construction where "everything depends on the detail." Unfortunately, the detail doesn't add up to a "confrontation" with the world, doesn't even add up to a coherent whole at all:

Rhetorically, I suppose you would call all of those riding crops and cravats and shirt buttons in Balzac's world synecdoches: they are parts that stand for an intelligible whole. In Flaubert's world, however, they seem more like apparent synecdoches, in that often the whole is never given, never quite achieved. While Emma is frequently described, we never quite see her whole. She and her world never quite cohere.

Further: "It is as if the parts of the world really are what is most significant about it--the rest may simply be metaphysics." Flaubert's very approach to realism, then, precludes a fiction that takes on problems other than the problems of representation themselves, beginning with the representation of Emma Bovary: "Emma is surely one of the most memorable 'characters' of the novels we have read, we want to construct her fully as a person, we live with her aspirations, delusions, disappointments. Yet we repeatedly are given to understand that as a living, breathing, character-construction, Emma is a product of language--of her reading, and reveries on her reading, and of the sociolects that define her world." When Brooks claims there is "something labored" about Madame Bovary, he intends it as "le mot juste" in describing Flaubert's relationship with language: "Writing was such a slow and painful process for Flaubert because he had to make something new, strange, and beautiful out of a language in essence commonplace."

"New, strange, and beautiful," it would seem, are finally incommensurate with "realism" as Peter Brooks would have us define it. Despite their importance as writers moving fiction toward a greater realism of representation--the attempt to create the illusion of life as lived by ordinary people--neither Dickens nor Flaubert can finally be embraced as true-blue realists dedicated to confronting the issues of the age. Both of them seem too interested in writing to be reliable social critics, the role Brooks appears to think supercedes all else in the realist's job description. Brooks almost seems to suggest that "art" and "realism" are mutually exclusive terms.

I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that for literary study "Mere 'appreciation' seems a little cloying, a little narrow, in prescribing an attitude of silent awe." The experience of literature is grounded in "mere appreciation" (although I would contend that "appreciation" is a much more concentrated and difficult task than its connotation as passive "admiration" usually suggests), but if the study of literature is to go beyond the initial (or even repeated) intensified encounter with the work, it does need to, in a sense, leave the "appreciation" of the work behind. Even a more methodical analysis of the specifically aesthetic elements of a text has to suspend immediate appreciation in order to focus on the particular devices the text incorporates and on the effect these devices create--in other words, on how the text works. "Silent awe" is hardly a useful response when the actual study of literature takes place.

But I can't agree--based on my reading of most scholarly articles published in most "name" academic journals--that for very many academic critics "it is simply taken for granted that there are other questions to be asked aside from 'what makes this poem beautiful?' and that the discipline can't go anywhere being confined to that question. In other words, appreciative admiration is assumed (somewhere in the background) but is not itself the goal." It is true that "there are other questions to be asked" aside from the aesthetic ones, but I don't believe that academic criticism in its current manifestation assumes "appreciative admiration, " foreground or background. Or if it does make such an assumption, it does so only to dismiss aesthetic appreciation as the concern of naive readers who haven't been apprised of the strategies employed by academic critics to transcend the "merely literary" in favor of more "serious" issues of politics and sociology.

And it may be true that the "discipline"--literature as submitted to the protocols and conventions of academic inquiry--can't remain "confined" to the question of aesthetic beauty, but this is a problem not for literature per se but for the subject "literature" as it is defined within the academic curriculum. In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics. As Jonathan himself says, "when literary studies forgets the aesthetic, watch out! The discipline becomes unmoored from its reason for being, confused in its aims."

I'd have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I'm afraid that "the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters," as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be used to shore up ideological positions, but "literature" as the record and register of literary art is held in contempt, at best the avocation of amateur readers (including bloggers), at worst a fancy instrument of oppression wielded by hyperliterate elites. If the only way works of literature can usefully be brought into the classroom or the pages of academic journals is to examine them for their "social constructions", or to expressly belittle mere aesthetic questions, in my opinion, as I've said here before, the best thing for literature would be to remove it from academic curricula altogether.

In his recent post on his Think Again blog about the misappropriation of deconstruction by American academics, Stanley Fish writes:

. . .No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

Among literary scholars, there are many who regard works of literature as a kind of social construction. In this view, a given work cannot be granted a special status as "art" separated from history or culture, since it is permeated with both. For literary study in its historicist and cultural studies incarnations, literature gives us access to the historical/cultural forces that worked through the writer to author the work, the exposure of which forces is the most important work of academic criticism. Literary art as an autonomous accomplishment that deserves consideration in its own right is not just shunted aside, but is dismissed outright as a delusion.

Behind this rejection of the "literary" as anything other than a window on culture and beyond that mostly an imposition by overweening writers claiming an exalted power they don't ultimately possesses is an attitude that might indeed be described as "normative conclusion" as Fish uses the term. Writers are inevitably responding to the social conditions of their time; they can't escape the historical contingencies that inform their assumptions about the world; their works might help us understand how culturally-bound beliefs get circulated around and through all culturally-inscribed modes of expression, but they certainly can't be considered as distinctive aesthetic objects produced by the play of human imagination. The notion that a work of literature might, in its encounter with particular readers, transcend the conditions, contingencies, and cultural presuppositions of its creation, at least for the moment of the reader's experience, just can't be countenanced. No text can escape the confines of its social construction.

Thus all literary works are "just" social constructions. And this conclusion has become the basis of the most widely-practiced forms of academic criticism, whereby poems and stories and novels (particularly the latter) are scrutinized for their socially-constructed representations, as if they were being punished for being found complicit with all the evils with which "culture" can be charged. But, as Fish points out, a specific work can be criticized for advancing a particular socially constructed vision that might be found objectionable (which in most cases means it has failed at being art in the first place), but it can hardly be criticized for being a social construction to one degree or another. Writers are human beings, not members of some alien species, so they cannot finally escape their circumstances as human beings, their being alive at a certain time, in a certain place, with all the attendant assumptions and perspectives that time and place embody.

Thus, to say that a work of literature is inescapably a social construction is precisely to say nothing. Of course it is. How could it be otherwise? That it can also be a work of art, "art" being defined not as something insulated from history and culture, outside of time and place, but as we human beings in all our socially constructed atttitudes and expectations choose to define it as we go along, seems to me not only possible but indispensable. Sometimes writers manage to raise themselves to an awareness of the social constructedness of aesthetic conventions and conventional discourse and compel their readers to rise to such an awareness as well. Sometimes they even work toward the dissolution of certain especially noxious social constructions. They don't always succeed in these efforts to confront social constructions, because they can't. We remain blind to some of them, especially if they're constructions of which we approve or which otherwise help us get our work done. But this is no reason to hold all of literature responsible for this unavoidable human failing.

From Donald Barthelme's story, "Report," published in book form (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts) in 1968:

. . .I said that ten thousand of our soldiers had already been killed in pursuit of the government's errors. I said that tens of thousands of the enemy's soldiers and civilians had been killed because of various errors, ours and theirs. I said that we are responsible for errors made in our name. I said that the government should not be allowed to make additional errors.

"Yes, yes," the chief engineer said, "there is doubtless much truth in what you say, but we can't possibly lose the war, can we? And stopping is losing, isn't it? The war regarded as a process, stopping regarded as an abort? We don't know how to lose a war. That skill is not among our skills. Our array smashes their array, that is what we know. That is the process. That is what is."

In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth includes a letter putatively written by "Amy Bellette" but, as it turns out, mostly written by her lover, E.I. Lonoff, the perfectionist writer whose portrayal in The Ghost Writer initiated Roth's series of Zuckerman novels. Bellette/Lonoff write:

Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.

I was reminded of this passage when reading Brian Boyd's "The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature," not because Boyd himself really finds external issues easier "to talk about than the fiction," certainly not because Boyd values such issues more than "the fiction," but because even in his attempt to retrieve the "art of literature" as the central subject of literary criticism he seemingly can't help but underscore the value of fiction as the gateway to something else.

Boyd correctly observes that

For the last few decades. . .scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

In order to demonstrate that to ignore the "imaginative accomplishment of a work" is to totally misunderstand the claims that art makes on us, Boyd further correctly observes that "For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial" and concludes from this that "attention—engagement in the activity—matters before meaning."

Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.

Boyd devotes the largest part of his essay to an analysis of the play with "patterns" in Nabokov's Lolita that shows, for Boyd, that "A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the 'meaning' or 'meanings' of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind."

Boyd's reading of Lolita is impeccable, and I couldn't agree more with his essential insight that attention precedes meaning and that the implications of this for our "appreciation" of literature are profound. Indeed, up to this point Boyd's account of the nature of art and the reception of art is entirely consistent with that given in John Dewey's Art as Experience, a book that stands as the foundation of my own philosophy of art and the claims of which I have tried to integrate with a more purely literary interest in formalist aesthetics (substituting for New Critical notions such as "organic unity" Dewey's emphasis on the unity of experience). Dewey similarly underscores the value of attentiveness and the process by which the reader or the viewer comes to be aware of patterns.

But in my opinion Boyd more or less gives back what he has taken away from those preoccupied with "meaning" in literature, with extracting from literature an analysis that services an extra- or even anti-literary agenda, when he declares that "The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations. . . ." Dewey would never have "justified" the experience of art by invoking this capacity to "process pattern more swiftly." Dewey's account emphasizes art's capacity to enlarge experience, to make us more appreciative of experience, not its utilitarian potential to speed up our recognition of patterns. Indeed, such speeding-up probably cuts off the full experience of art as Dewey describes it. Art may or may not contribute to a "Flynn effect," but that it might do so is hardly the most important reason to attend to art's patterns in the first place. The attention we pay to art is its own compensation.

Thus I also don't see why Boyd needs to appeal to "science" as a way of invoking the immediacy of art. The Darwinian/biological analysis of art itself brings along its own anti-art baggage, and finally the appeal to Science as the all-encompassing context in which art is to be understood is no more helpful to art than the appeal to History or to Culture. That "works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind" or that "Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns" seem to me conclusions that are just as extra-literary in their attempts to use art and literature for that "something else" as the idea that works of art and literature disclose cultural symptoms or that they capture the elusive forces of history. (Or that they reveal the flaws of their creators.) Finally they also seem topics that might be more convenient to talk about than the fiction.

Ultimately the problem may be that Boyd's brief is not so much on behalf of a more profitable way of reading literature as it is an attempt to reintroduce "literature as an art" back into the university curriculum. But "the fluid dynamics of attention," however much they do govern our response to works of art or literature when we are freely encountering them, are not really "replicable" in the college classroom unless you want to spend most of it simply reading a novel, poem, or story and directing your students to be very dynamic in their attention. Teaching literature because it brings out many of the imperatives of human evolution doesn't seem any more faithful to the "imaginative accomplishments" of literature than any of the other methods of literary study that have been tried. It may be that the "indulgent inclinations" really do need to be indulged outside the classroom and elsewhere than in scholarly journals.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has read a biography of V.S. Naipaul and decided she "certainly will not buy another book by this egomaniac." She proclaims:

The man and the writer are not as easily separated as critics would have us believe. Writers don't have to be saints but they do have to have empathy and live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all. What would we do if we found Richard Branson beat his mistress and drove his wife to death? Or if the BBC's director general spoke of his addiction to paid sex? Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency.

As a matter of fact, the man and the writer are quite easily separated. Step one would be to avoid reading biographies of writers. This would leave you with only the work (about which harsh things might certainly be said, but they wouldn't be inspired by an animus against the man founded on moral disapproval rather than an estimation of the writing founded on literary judgment) and spare you the emotional energy required to work up a good lathering of moral outrage. It would encourage you to regard "criticism" as an act of engaged reading of fiction or poetry rather than the dissemination of gossip. Indeed, if we would all forswear the reading of most literary biographies, such gossip would not become a part of our literary discourse in the first place and the whole question of "separating" the writer and the work would never come up.

If step one proves too difficult, step two might be to acknowledge that writers should indeed "live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all," but to further acknoweldge that this is a statement about personal conduct, about the way we interact with other humans in a social context, not about writing novels. What exactly are the rules of fiction-writing that "apply to us all," other than that those who do write novels should do so in an interesting or compelling way? If the writer has not fulfilled that obligation, then refusing to read any more of that writer's work would be an appropriate response, but such a refusal based on violation of rules of behavior (a malfeasance to which many. many writers would have to plead guilty) is just an easy way of avoiding the harder work of considering works of literature on their own terms as works of invention and imagination. It's a way of avoiding literature, which too often doesn't allow us to indulge in our moral certainties.

"Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency." Only writers and artists who themselves refuse to separate their lives from their work would stupidly "claim immunity from decency." They take their freedom to flaunt rules of decorum and challenge established conventions (formal and othewise) in their work to mean they have similar freedom in their real lives. This is mostly childishness, which is, I suppose, morally culpable, although again I can't see that it should affect our estimation of whatever genuine insights and aesthetic achievements arise from their iconoclasm as artists. It doesn't seem to me that Naipaul's moral failings can be placed in this category of deliberate indecency, anyway. His is a more garden-variety exhibition of human weakness, and as such will no doubt continue to be noted (probably adnauseam, by those who don't want to be bothered by mere literature), but ultimately his reputation as a writer will still be determined by the appeal of this work, not by the noxiousness of his behavior, even if the charges apparently leveled at him in this biography are true, which I myself don't accept simply because the biographer claims they are.

As Steve Mitchelmore points out in his own discussion of Alibhai-Brown's condemnation of Naipaul, she "recalls wistfully the days she read and loved Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. As she doesn't say, we can only guess why she loved his work at that time. Was he a nicer chap?" Ailbhai-Brown's own response to Naipaul's artistry in Biswas shows that it is not only possible but preferable to separate the writer from the work. She might have remained blissfully unaware of Naipaul's personal derelictions, or dismissed them the irrelevancies they are, and retained her fondness for his earlier work. Instead she now has to concoct a narrative in which since Biswas Naipaul's books "have got increasingly bigoted and nasty; he was moved more by hate than love, and an ugliness repeatedly broke through his beautifully written prose." How in the world does Alibhai-Brown know that Naipaul was "moved more by hate than love"? She has to cling to some such notion in order to preserve her conviction that Naipaul the man emerges in all his nastiness in the work, but it's a pretty impoverished view of literature that suggests it can be so easily be dismissed through this two-bit piece of psychologizing.

A "News and Trends" item in Poets & Writers on the state of reading in America informs me that

some say another fundamental factor in the decline of reading must also be addressed: contemporary writers themselves, who have a critical role to play if current trends are to be reversed. “I do think for a long time writers turned completely away from the audience,” [Christian] Wiman says. “You can’t simply go back to the past, of course, but I do think writers have to be aware of an audience.” [Audrey] Niffenegger points specifically to modernism as a wedge between writers and readers. “There was a shift away from narrative, where writers gave you less and less and made you work harder and harder. People got the idea that everything was going to be like Finnegans Wake, and everybody just said, ‘Okay, we’re going to the movies.’”

It's tempting simply to dismiss these as the philistine remarks they clearly are, but a closer examination of what both Wiman (as editor of Poetry magazine, presumably chosen to scold modern poets) and Niffenegger (left to take down modern fiction) are actually saying reveals that they're also just wrong.

It's telling that Wiman follows his accusation that poets have "turned completely away from the audience" with the caveat that we "can't simply go back to the past," as if the accusation implies exactly that in "the past" poets embraced their proper audience. Given that Wiman is one of the prominent exponents of the "poetry ruined itself when it stopped rhyming" school of advanced critical thinking, it's almost certain that what he really means here is that if only poets would return to rhyme and meter, they'd get their audience back.

But from my experience teaching introductory literature, most "general" readers of poetry seem to find contemporary confessional-style lyrics more accessible than older, closed form poems. They tend to be written in plainer, more idiomatic language, and their lack of rhyme and meter only makes them seem more direct, less concerned with artificial devices. Indeed, the farther back into the tradition of English-language lyric poetry they go, these students tend to find older, more ostensibly conventional (and thus more formally recognizable) poems less engaging. The intricacies of meter and rhyme scheme only appear peculiar to them (once they've been alerted to their existence), and the more obviously "poetic" language of this poetry they find difficult, hardly productive of the pleasure Wiman suggests poetry no longer provides.

There's plenty of accessible plain-language poetry around (Billy Collins, anyone?), so unless Wiman means to identify only the most insistently "experimental" poetry of the last 50 years or so as that which snubbed an audience, it's really hard to understand his complaint. Since few casual readers of poetry even know this line of poetry exists, it seems a pretty brittle stick with which to bash contemporary poets.

Niffenegger is more willing, it would seem, to identify the usual suspect of modernism for the putative decline of reading. ("Modernism" in such critiques being generally equated with "difficult" writing, that which makes us "work harder and harder.") And while it is arguably true that modernism began a shift in fiction away from a focus on "story," this shift was motivated by a stronger interest in "character," in ways of representing character that seemed faithful to the ways real people thought and acted. It really isn't credible to allege that in making this shift writers were offering "less and less"; they believed, in fact, they were offering "more"--more insight into human behavior, more emphasis on the motivations that give rise to "story."

If readers have become moviegoers because of changes in the form that fiction assumes, it has been in response to this sort of character-driven fiction, not because Finnegans Wake has become the paradigm for writers of literary fiction, which it certainly has not. Most nonreaders are as ignorant of the existence of Joyce's experimental novel as they are of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y, and if they'd rather go to the movies than read serious fiction, it's because they find Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor or Toni Morrison just as difficult, just as "boring" as any of the high modernists or metafictionists. If all fiction needs to do is be more like movies, what's the point of writing it in the first place?

If people like Wiman and Niffenegger want to continue to blame writers themselves for the American audience's indifference to their work, they should at least get their facts straight and reflect on their own assumptions about American readers, about whose tastes they offer only fantasies.

Jim H. at his blog Wisdom of the West quite correctly takes issue with Jill Lepore's shallow comparisons of history and fiction:

Lepore, I believe, misunderstands fiction. She says: "Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people." As she acknowledges, this view is a bit outdated because much current history is precisely the study of private life. But, her equation is at the level of story: history and fiction tell stories about people, great and small. This is a shallow view of fiction. Sure, history can tell stories about events—how they happened, why they happened, what their consequences were, etc. And fiction can tell similar stories, the only difference being that the fictional stories are putatively made up.

Unfortunately, he then reverts to the usual sort of explanation of what makes fiction unique:

However, as a historian, the writer cannot enter into the consciousness of his subject. The historian cannot say how richly succulent the juice from the veal loin Henry IV ate the night he learned of Richard II's death tasted as it dribbled down his chin. The historian cannot say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony as their boat sailed down the gentle Nile on a warm summer evening. The historian cannot say how the point of the ice axe felt as it entered Trotsky's head. . . .

Actually. the fiction writer can no more "enter into the consciousness of his subject" than can the historian. There is neither a "consciousness" to enter nor a "subject" whose consciousnesss is revealed. There are words on a page. The skillful fiction writer might make us believe we are observing a "person," that we are exploring his/her "mind," but such explorations are hardly authoritative soundings of what the human mind is really like. They are a convention of fiction writing by which an illusion of intimacy is created, but they certainly cannot withstand scrutiny as an account of human consciousness.

Neither can the novelist, any more than the historian, "say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony" (I'm pretty sure I don't want to know that, anyway). Or rather, both the historian and the novelist can say what this was like, but I don't see how the novelist has any more special access to such information than the historian. It's a convention of history-writing that the author doesn't ordinarily dwell on this sort of thing, and a convention of a certain kind of fiction ("psychological realism") that the author does, but finally the novelist has no more idea than anyone else what olfactory sensations Marc Antony might have experienced on his trip down the Nile. A writer might offer us a fictional "Marc Antony" whose sensory experiences are described for us, but this hardly gives the novelist an edge over the historian when writing about actual historical events.

Fiction does do more than tell stories about people, but it can also do more than pretend to "enter into the consciousness" of people. To believe this by now fairly standard technique of faux-psychological probing into the minds of characters is the only thing that separates fiction from history, or from film, is a rather impoverished view of the possibilities of fiction as a literary form. Indeed, the purely literary possibilities of the "interior" strategy were, it seems to me, pretty much exhausted in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. Adventurous writers following on their achievement--Beckett, Burroughs, Barthelme, Sorrentino--discovered fresh ways of extending their experiments in form, of showing us how fiction can be different not just from history or film, but from previous versions of fiction as well. More such discoveries can be made.

In The Logical Structure of the World, Rudolph Carnap attempts to show how a "constructional system" can be built the purpose of which is "to order the objects of all sciences into a system according to their reducibility to one another." Among these "objects" are what Carnap calls "cultural objects" (which include works of art) and "pyschological objects." The former, Carnap maintains, are reducible (for the purposes of this system) to the latter:

The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art, for example a marble statue, is indeed not identical with the recognition of the sensible characteristics of the piece of marble, its shape, size, color, and material. But this awareness is not something outside of the perception, since for it no content other than the content of the perception is given; more precisely: this awareness is uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses. Thus, there exists a unique functional relation between the physical properties of the piece of marble and the aesthetic content of the work of art which is represented in this piece of marble.

To put it another way, the aesthetic experience includes an awareness of the piece of marble in all of its physical attributes, or of a page of text with its words printed in a particular style on paper of a particular color and weight, but it only begins there. "Aesthetic content" requires another step to be fulfilled:

. . .if a physical object is to be formed or transformed in such a way that it becomes a document, a bearer of expression for the cultural object, then this requires an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals, and thus psychological occurences in which the cultural object comes alive; these psychological occurences are the manifestations of the cultural object.

Although he uses the word "experience" rather than "psychological occurences," and although he is more rooted to the "physical object" than is Carnap in what seems an essentially phenomenological analyis of the experience of art, John Dewey in Art as Experience offers a philosophy of art and the reception of art that at least has a family resemblance to what Carnap is suggesting here. Both Dewey and Carnap avoid attributing metaphysical status to the "beauty" of art (a beauty that is intrinsic to the work) by locating the aesthetic in our apprehension of the work. As Carnap puts it, for the work to become a "bearer of expression," there must be "an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals." Similarly, Dewey would maintain that these "several individuals" include both artist and audience, as the work is not really complete until the viewer/listener/reader is able to "recreate" it in perception: "Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest."

Thus aesthetic judgment is unavoidably subjective, requiring the "transformation" Carnap describes, a process that will be bound to the "point of view and interest" of the "beholder," as Dewey has it. Still, the "sensible characteristics" of the work remain what they are, and aesthetic judgment cannot simply be cut loose from the work's sensible properties. Indeed, the more fully one experiences art according to Dewey's account of the process, the more, and the more intensely, those sensible properties will be felt.

It seems to me that both Carnap and Dewey remind us that, although the aesthetic is consummated in the "psychological occurences" experienced by readers or viewers, the sensible charactertistics of works of art and literature cannot be denied or dismissed. Thus, in reading fiction, we should not forget that neither people nor "things" are the subjects of perception. Words are. If, for example, we are reading a realist novel, we are not experiencing "the world" faithfully reproduced at all. We are not even, finally, experiencing a world of the author's creation, whether it's a world meant to be taken as a version of the real world or one the author has imaginatively brought into being. We are experiencing writing, which, through the psychological processes Carnap and Dewey invoke, is "transformed" into a world of characters and their stories. Ultimately a sufficient accumulation of responses by readers in turn transforms the work into a "cultural object." In our haste to describe that realist novel as a convincing "picture" of reality or as something "that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict," we should not forget that it's neither. As an object of aesthetic experience, it's just writing, skillfully arranged for your act of recreation.

In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision, Peter Brooks writes:

With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the present. It is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable "industrial novel," one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its "roman social," including popular socialist varieties.

To the extent that Brooks wants to link the rise of realist fiction to the rise of science and "theories of history," I can't really see how the former is influenced much by the latter, except specifically in the fiction of naturalist writers such as Emile Zola or, in the United States, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. These writers did indeed try to depict human behavior as it was defined by science--especially Darwinism--and by the forces of history. But these were writers who were deliberately using realism to illustrate a view of human life as determined by such external forces, not exploring the purely literary possibilities of realism as a still relatively new aesthetic strategy. They may have in a sense been portraying "things as they are," but they were doing it from an abstract philosophical perspective, not as an attempt to first of all render life in all of its particularities.

I equally don't understand why a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art. To me, a "defining characteristic" of any fiction that can make a claim to be literary art, that can still be taken seriously in the long run, after the "social problems" of the day have been replaced by the next set, is that it not "confront" any issues or problems other than the literary problems immediately at hand.

Brooks's own insistence here that realism must "take on" larger social and cultural questions is actually contradicted, it seems to me, by what he asserts just a few paragraphs later:

You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and acquire in order to define themselves--their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed part of the very definition of "character," of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it--a report often in the form of what we call description. The descriptive is typical--sometimes maddeningly so, of these novels. And the picture of the whole only emerges--if it does--from the accumulation of things.

This seems to me a pretty good account of what the best realist novels do: Draw the reader into a meticulously described world that the reader can accept as like the "real" world (keeping in mind that realistic description in fiction is just another device the writer can use, no more "authentic" than any other, given that what the reader is finally "confronted" with are just words on a page) and allow the reader to "see" the approximated world as fully as possible. If this sort of realism does bear philosophical implications, they are centered around the idea that the real is what is perceived. (Later, the "psychological" realists such as Woolf and Joyce would reject this; their fiction finds the real in how things are perceived, by focusing on the internal processes of consciousness.) But finally the art of realism lies in the way "things" are organized, in the manner and the skill with which the writer entices the reader to take note of the illuminating details.

Such an approach seems wholly at odds with the notion that realist fiction makes the reader aware of historical abstractions and social "issues." (The "generalized" rather than the "concrete.") "Things as they are" in the one seem on a wholly different scale than "things as they are" in the other. We can be made aware in fiction, subtly if implicitly, of historical change or social conflict, but only by acknowleding that the "defining characteristic" of realism is its particular approach to aesthetic representation, not its willingness to "take on" non-literary "problems." I am still reading Brooks's book, and I hope he will demonstrate to me how these two discrepant impulses can be reconciled in an account of literary realism.

The Litblog Co-op is closing down, mainly because so many of its members have become so preoccupied with their own blogs, as well as other literary endeavors that in some cases their blogs helped to make possible, that they could not devote the kind of time and attention required to keep a loosely-affiliated group like the LBC functioning adequately. The LBC was formed with a specific mission to highlight books that weren't being discussed much, or at all, in mainstream book sections by putting the collective authority of the then better-known literary weblogs behind the selection of one book per quarter the group believed was worth readers' attention.

I'd like to take the LBC's dissolution as an opportunity to not only reflect on its success in highlighting such books but also on the evolution of the literary blog from the time (actually only 3-4 years ago) when "literary weblog" seemed merely a peculiar conjunction of words to the present moment, when the litblog has become sufficiently established that numerous print-based critics have attacked literary blogs for encroaching on their territory (the gates to which they apparently intend to keep).

When I discovered what I would identify as the original group of self-identified literary weblogs--Maud Newton, The Literary Saloon, Moorish Girl, Golden Rule Jones, The Elegant Variation, The Return of the Reluctant, a few others--I had for a while wondered why there was not more web-based literary discussion and criticism, since such discussion on the internet could be both more widely disseminated and more up-to-date than what was published in magazines--most of which had actually been moving away from providing their content online--or even in newspapers, only a very few of which printed literary-related commentary on a semi-regular basis, anyway. What I found on these ur-litblogs was, if not fully worked-out literary criticism, an obvious enthusiasm about books and an admirable interest in serious fiction. As a lapsed academic, I was especially pleased to find such an interest among people who, in most cases, were not academics, since living in the world of the academy can lead one to suspect there are no serious readers of serious fiction outside its insulated walls.

My alienation from academe was in part a reaction against the prevailing modes of academic criticism, which in my view had essentially abandoned "literature itself" in favor of critical approaches that were mostly just a way of doing history or sociology by other means. I had pursued a Ph.D in literary study in order to study literature, not to validate my political allegiances on the cheap, or to study something called "culture," an artifact of which literature might be considered but given no more emphasis than any other cultural "expression." I was looking to find a way to write literary criticism that continued to focus on the literary qualities of literature, and to that end had published several critical essays in publications that would still print such efforts when I happened upon the literary weblogs I have mentioned. I soon enough concluded there was no reason the literary blog could not accomodate a form of literary criticism--longer than the typical kind of post I was seeing on the extant litblogs but shorter than the conventional scholarly article or long critical essay. Trying out these possibilities has been the ongoing project of this blog over the now four years of its existence.

At a time when still print-bound critics and book reviewers seem to be handing off a rhetorical baton in their eagerness to keep ahead of the perceived threat posed by literary blogs, it is rather difficult to recall how thoroughly marginal to the established critical discourse the literary weblog was in the first months and years of its existence. Among the criticisms that were directed at literary blogs in this initial stage of audience-building was the accusation they were too insular, too preoccupied with linking to each other in a kind of in-group celebration. And indeed there was a good deal of cliquish cross-linking, but this was mostly, it seemed to me, a function of the litblog's presumed marginality, a way of creating a community of engaged readers--the early bloggers were readers first of all--who could communicate their interests, insights, and enthusiasms to like-minded others. While most of us exploring the boundaries of the new medium were surely hoping our posting might attract a wider audience, I don't think many anticipated such a dramatic increase in attention paid to litblogs as did indeed occur. (The suddenness of this increase can be illustrated by the fact that as recently as BEA 2005, efforts by the then just-created Litblog Co-op--specifically by LBC mastermind Mark Sarvas--to interest the powers that be at the BEA in a panel discussion of literary blogs were rebuffed because few people associated with the event had heard of literary blogs.)

The Litblog Co-op was created during the first wave of interest in literary weblogs from beyond the small corner of the blogosphere litbloggers and their initial audience had staked out for themselves--a few noticies in newspapers, links from more established, non-literary blogs, comments from "name" authors and critics increasingly showing up on various litblogs. As I recall it, the LBC aimed to accomplish two related goals: to bring attention to small-press books and less-known writers, and, implicitly, to raise the profile of literary weblogs even higher, to make them, through the authority the LBC might acquire from its selections, more of an accepted presence in the national conversation about books and writers. These were both entirely laudable goals, one directed toward showcasing alternatives to the fiction most loudly celebrated by the "book business," one directed toward providing alternative sources of discussion and debate about current fiction.

I'd have to say that our success in accomplishing the first goal was mixed. Several books that received little or no attention in the mainstream review pages did get some exposure as LBC nominees. Some of these were books by first-time authors, while others were by more veteran authors (some in translation) whose previous work had not gotten them the recognition they might have deserved. However, I don't think the LBC was ultimately able to establish itself as an authoritative guide to small-press books and overlooked fiction, judging by the degree of notice taken of our selections by blogs not themselves part of the LBC or by the literary community more generally, as well as by the number of comments most of the postings on the LBC blog received. The LBC's Read This! selections just never seemed to achieve the status with readers of current fiction that they were originally meant to achieve.

I believe that one explanation for this failure is that the LBC never really recovered from the disappointment spawned by its very first selection, a more or less mainstream work of "literary fiction" that had already been widely reviewed and whose selection seemed to many (including me) to be inconsistent with the LBC's stated mission. This selection perhaps indicated that the LBC was going to be business as usual, choosing the same old books published by the same old publishers and reviewed in the same old high-profile book reviews. Our subsequent selections mostly demonstrated that this was not the case, but it may be that an impression was left that the LBC wasn't quite the champion of unduly neglected fiction it was claiming to be.

It may also be that, eventually at least, the Litblog Co-op was perceived as a too narrowly-constituted, "clubbish" sort of group. When the LBC was formed, it could plausibly claim to represent the "leading" literary weblogs, but the litblogosphere has so dramatically expanded, both in sheer numbers of blogs and in the quality of the posting to be found there, that it really could no longer assert itself as the collective voice of the preeminent litbloggers. The LBC did enlarge its membership, and continued to invite new members when places became available, but this only made the process of nominating titles, choosing a favorite, and posting on the ultimate selection increasingly unwieldy, and it would have only gotten worse if we'd expanded the membership once again. When the litblogosphere was a fairly self-contained space, populated by bloggers united by a desire to identify worthy books and confer a kind of "indie" credential to these books, it was still possible for the member bloggers of the LBC to consider themselves the vanguard of a new online literary movement, but by now such a claim just isn't credible.

As for the second goal of bringing more attention to literary weblogs, there is no doubt that litblogs have established themselves as part of literary culture, but I don't really think this was a direct result of the actions of the Litblog Co-op. Perhaps the existence of the LBC did contribute to the increase of weblogs dedictated to literature, both past and present, but it was only a modest factor among those that led more readers to litblogs and ultimately led some of them to become litbloggers. I think it's probable that the individual members of the LBC did more to make the litblogosphere an accepted source of information about and judgment of current fiction on their own blogs than did the LBC itself. It's likely that a given title can be exposed to a potential audience just as effectively when two or three or more individual bloggers discover it and consider its merits as when it is in effect made the winner of a competition conducted by some such organization as the Litblog Co-op.

In this way the LBC may have unwittingly performed at least one useful service. Its relatively brief existence, and the reasons for its brevity, suggests that probably there will be no online version of the National Book Critics Circle, no self-appointed arbiters of literary value on the net to rival the NBCC and other print-based critics' associations that exist mainly to bestow awards. This does not mean the litblogosphere, for example, cannot wield the authority represented by these kinds of groups, but it does mean that whatever authority literary blogs do attain will be much more widely dispersed, not concentrated in organized groups pretending to encompass the "best" available judgment about current fiction or poetry. Since there is no such "best" judgment, just as the books chosen as "best" by the NBCC, The National Book Awards, or, indeed, the Litblog Co-op are no such thing (except by accident), readers will need to find the litblogs that consistently examine the sorts of books they find they like to read. This may result in a further fracturing of the litblogosphere into zones of "niche" interest, but this will only reflect an already existing diversity of taste and preference and will hardly lead to the destruction of a "common" literary culture, the existence of which is and always was a myth.

I expect the litblogosphere to continue to grow. I especially expect an increase in blogs offering longer-form commentary and criticism, as opposed to the link-centered blog that defined the literary weblog in its first years of existence but that by now has become just one kind of litblog among others. The more that literary blogs become credible contributors to critical/literary discourse, the less will be the need of an organization like the Litblog Co-op, or for any other effort to unite bloggers on behalf of the literary blog as a medium for serious literary discussion. Considering that all signs point to a decline in literary coverage in newspapers and magazines, I still believe the time may come when blogs and other forms of online publishing will dominate the literary discussion. If so, the LBC will have played some short-term role in underscoring the potential of literary weblogs, although their long-term potential is still to be tested.

To me, book reviewing has never been hack work, or grunt work, or community service for those of us who've committed the unpardonable crime of not being novelists, or some kind of sad little way-station on the road to big literary success-I see it as a self-sufficient art. In fact, it's one of my very favorite literary forms, and the form in which a lot of my favorite writers have done their best work.

Further:

As book critics, our writing is a writing on writing. We respond to an author's metaphors with counter-metaphors; we critique or praise a story by telling a story about it. My favorite work is always that which allows itself to imaginatively intermingle with its source-text: it can be imitative, competitive, or collaborative; it can mimic or counteract the tone of the source. It can be subtle or overt. But it will always have this unique, doubled-over,creative quality-and that's what keeps book criticism vital, and why it will survive.

Presumably by describing criticism as writing that "imaginatively intermingle[s] with its source-text," Anderson especially has in mind something like his own idiotic review of Richard Price's Lush Life, which presents itself as a "book review procedural" mimicking Price's latest crime novel:

Stanny looking around the squad room, the Quality of Literature task force: Mayo, Sanchez, Hsu—three clip-on ties at a faux-oak table; their mantra: Quote, summarize, condemn; their motto: Judge every book by its cover. Sanchez hunched in the back, between the dictionary stands and broken typewriters, tugging on his soul patch, working up nerve, a whole shelf overpiled with advance copies ready to tip over behind him. Hsu scribbling his V-Ball. Excerpts from Lush Life dangle-tacked all over the walnut-paneled walls, ceiling to floor, easy reference; in front of each Aeron an inch-thick dossier, lists of major characters, themes, frags of description, more themes, page refs, key passages, color-coded maps, little bio of Richard Price. . . .

After reading this "review," I was torn between thinking I'd never give Price's fiction another chance if this is the sort of commentary it inspires and that perhaps I should read one of these procedural novels in which Price now seems to specialize because no writer should be judged by the inanity of a reviewer who can't find something more useful to do than concoct such a pathetic piece of gibberish.

Then there's this equally hopeless attempt to describe Peter Carey's fiction through a metaphor that just won't let loose:

Peter Carey’s talent is a vine in constant search of a trellis. In order to reach its full leafy abundance, his art needs to wrap its tendrils around some stabilizing foreign construct—the rough life and diction of a nineteenth-century outlaw (True History of the Kelly Gang) or the untold backstory of a canonical Dickens novel (Jack Maggs). Once he finds a suitable trellis, Carey thoroughly overruns it, weaving his work inextricably into its slats, unleashing wave after bright wave of exotic blooms, and littering the ground beneath him with strange Australian fruits. Rarely has an artist been so liberated by constraint. When he’s in top form—as, for instance, in his masterpiece about Ned Kelly—Carey seems determined to obliterate any distinction between vine and trellis, organism and synthesis, growth and support, source and text. . .

But what seems at first to be the novel’s sustaining imaginative trellis—the sharply limited perspective of a confused boy suffering the painful fallout of violent radicalism—collapses about 30 pages in. This leaves the irrepressible vine of Carey’s talent to wander, without restraint, all over the fictional garden, where it smothers nearby growths, gets tangled on old rusty shovels, and finally meanders off under the deck to drop its underripe fruit in the dark. . .

That the National Book Critics Circle would give an award (one of the many meaningless awards it adds to the pile of equally meaningless ones given out by the "book world") to Anderson for such imaginative intermingling as this says everything that needs to be said both about the sad state of book reviewing in America and about the constant rear-guard actions in which the NBCC and other representatives of mainstream reviewing have been engaged against blogs and internet publishing more widely. They are afraid that "literary journalism" conceived in the grandiose mode Anderson describes ("We respond to an author's metaphors with counter-metaphors") will no longer have much cachet once literary commentary becomes dominated by those who like literature for other than its ability to provide them with material for their rhetorical posturing and their comedy routines.

Criticism as "grunt work"--laboring on behalf of works of literature because they deserve intelligent analysis--seems to me a perfectly respectable undertaking, especially when it's paired against the kind of clownish performances Anderson tries to defend. By identifying book reviews of this silly sort as "one of my very favorite literary forms, and the form in which a lot of my favorite writers have done their best work," Anderson all but declares he's more interested in maintaining a place for such performances than he is in fiction. Thus, he does more for the image of book reviewing as "hack work" than the lowliest blogger or the reviewer who does see criticism as a kind of "community service" (the community of serious readers) could ever do.

Anderson is particularly egregious in his deployment of the "imaginative intermingling" method of book reviewing, but it's an approach to reviewing fiction that's common enough among all the best "literary journalists." Few of them seem to have the skill or the patience that's required to do actual close analysis (and again James Wood provides a useful counter-example of a critic who is able to do such analysis, and also able to offer it in lively and accessible prose), so they devise this notion of the book review as a separate but equal "literary form" that can help them comfortably evade critics' responsibility to do justice to the work at hand and avoid doing a critical tap dance of their own invention. In this way they fool themselves into thinking they're doing something "vital," but only their fellow dancers could believe this is true.

Justin Courter's Skunk: A Love Story (Omnidawn Press) is a gimmicky novel whose gimmick almost works. To the extent that it makes the novel consistently enjoyable to read, in fact (it if is appropriate to call a narrative in which the main characer lives with skunks and drinks their musk "enjoyable"), it does work well enough. But ulimately the bizarre behavior that motivates the story recounted by the novel's first-person narrator seems designed to signal toward some broader thematic relevance I, for one, was unable to fully work out.

The narrator himself accounts for his attraction to skunk musk by connecting it to memories of his mother:

My mother drank quite a lot of beer when I was growing up. She always drank McDougal's--an imported brand that comes in a green bottle and has a slightly skunky aroma. This was the first scent to greet my nostrils in the morning and the last whiff I sniffed before falling asleep at night. I awoke each morning to the clanking of beer bottles as my mother opened and shut the door of the refrigerator to get out her first McDougal's before starting my breakfast. Then I heard more clinking of empty bottles, as she cleared the kitchen table, filled a large garbage bag with the previous day's bottles and carried them outside to put in a can by the street.

One day the narrator, Damien, brings home a dead skunk, thinking his mother will be able to brew her own beer using this "raw material out of which beer was made." Suffice it to say that his mother doesn't appreciate his gift, and it is only a few days after this incident that the mother is put into a mental hospital, where she eventually commits suicide. Out of this noxious mixture of childhood associations and ultimate trauma emerges, presumably, Damien's adult fixation on skunk musk.

The adult Damien is a loner and something of a misanthrope, although his misanthropy does not seem founded in an excessively high estimation of his own worth:

. . .My eyes are as dark as my hair and are extremely weak. For this reason I have worn thick glasses since I can remember. When I worked at Grund & Greene, I still had the same pair of black frames that had served me since high school, though my prescription had changed many times. Despite the fact that I am quite capable of making my way in the modern world, I know what a miserably inadequate creature, despite my efforts, I truly am. My constitution is so delicate and my eyes so weak that I would not have survived if I had dwelt in an earlier era of history, say, in the Stone Age. I would have been one of the casualties of natural selection--either killed by a wild boar during a hunt because I could not see it coming, or maimed by one of the bigger, stronger boys of the tribe before I reached the age where humans begin copulating--and thus would have been unlikely to pass my defective genes on to future generations. Hence, the race would have continued to grow stronger, as indeed it should. . . .

Still, Damien's inability to come to terms with the modern world, and all of its ways of reminding him he is "defective," is reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly, although Damien's later experiences with what can only be called musk-addiction (he eventually learns to "milk" his skunks and drinks the musk), read like a farcical turn on William S. Burroughs, and Courter's depiction of Damien's retreat to a rural area to become a farmer seems to draw strongly from T.C. Boyle. Ultimately, however, Damien's voice is distinctive, and it is to Courter's credit that this voice has a kind of compulsive power that keeps our curiosity alive despite the fact that Damien Youngquist is in many ways a pretty repulsive character.

Early in the novel Damien meets up with a woman named Pearl, a rogue marine biologist who has on obsession with fish similar to Damien's obsession with skunks. Thus able to tolerate each other's fetish, the two begin a sexually acrobatic love affair that is interrupted when Damien's skunk house is raided and the skunks killed, and when he encounters Pearl's self-described fiance and subsequently embarks on his rural adventure. Later Pearl returns, but she is unable to prevent Damien's apparent ruin: A latter-day hippie neighbor begins using Damien's skunk musk to create a new recreational drug and is busted; to get a lighter sentence for himself, he fingers Damien as the drug ring's mastermind. Damien is carted off to jail and later to a drug-treatment facility.

One of the reasons I liked this book is precisely its skillful use of first-person narration. I have more or less come to the conclusion that the only way an otherwise conventional narrative (and Skunk is, depite its unconventional subject and eccentric characters, essentially a narrative-driven novel, without much in the way of purely formal experimentation) can succeed, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, is through first-person narrative. The third-person central-consciousnes mode of narration (sometimes called the "free indirect style"), which has become the default mode of storytelling, providing us with both story and "pyschological realism," is now so worn out and tepid, at least for me, that only first-person narratives can poke through the narrative haze emitted by so many indifferently-related stories to capture my attention in the first place. Much can be done with first-person narrative, starting but not ending with the manipulation of the reader's trust in the story being told.

Thus, Skunk presents us with a first-person account by a character we have every reason to believe might not be clear-sighted, both literally--Damien's poor eyesight continues to deteriorate throughout the narrative, but whether this is a side-effect of the skunk musk or just a natural decline, given what we've been told about his poor vision, we really don't know--and figuratively. Might Damien, like his mother, be prone to mental illness? Might the skunk musk have exacerbated this problem? How much do we trust Damien's narrative as the accurate account of what "really" happened? For me, the existence of such potential amibiguity only deepens the novel's interest, creating layers of "meaning" that the third-person method necessarily excludes.

Unfortunately, as the novel nears its conclusion, the events become increasingly contrived and its portrayal of addiction heavy-handed. It seems as though Damien's story of addiction and recovery (as comical as it is) is being offered to us as containing some essential "truth" about addiction. Are we being told that the modern world has become so alienating that we are all led to our own addictions in order to cope with it? That, if so, we should be left alone to indulge them? That we ought to rise above them and find a way to live a productive life? These seem rather pat and familiar themes for a novel otherwise so unfamiliar in its style and its cast of characters.

Nonetheless, Justin Courter has admirably succeeded in taking a character so odd and behavior so potentially repugnant you might think nothing can be done with them and creating from them a surprisingly engaging novel. If it seems that Courter is daring you to read on after learning about his protagonist's habit, you should take the dare because you might find yourself hooked on Skunk.

William Bradley at the blog Incertus takes issue with the recommended "goals" of creative writing instruction for undergraduates as expressed by AWP. The first two goals listed are "An Overview of Literature" and "Expertise in Critical Analysis", while "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer’s Craft" comes in third. Bradley asks:

Does it seem odd to anyone else that "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer's Craft" is listed as the third goal for creative writing instruction? Doesn't it seem like learning how to write should be priority number one? Yes, getting a strong background in literature and honing critical thinking skills are important, but aren't they important in a creative writing class because they help facilitate the goal of students learning how to write?

I do find it odd, but only because I would have thought that by now the AWP would have given in to complaints about requiring literature courses for creative writing degrees and given its approval to craft-driven approaches. This would only be in keeping with the general drift toward "practical" relevance in most undergraduate degree programs, and it's to the AWP's credit that it hasn't yet gone with the flow.

Learning how to write should indeed be the ultimate goal for students in creative writing, but exactly how one would learn this without the widest possible familiarity with literary history and with the basic principles of literary analysis is not at all apparent to me. Students who take "learning how to write" seriously are not learning a set of rules or some generalized standards that simply need to be applied. They are learning how they might eventually write poems that do not just invoke the name of "poetry" as it has been codified into a set of established precepts or write fiction that does not just perform some known variations on the "well-made" story. They can do these things, in my opinion, only when they are relatively familiar with the "tradition" that gives their own work definition and that in turn they hope to revise or modify. (This can certainly be done by any aspiring writer without the mediation of an academic program, although an academic creative writing program should make this encounter with tradition more focused and more organized, or else it really has no useful reason to exist.) And I really don't understand how a "strong background in literature" can "facilitate the goal of students learning how to write" unless it comes first. Otherwise, works of literature are used only for imitation, to illustrate ""pacing" here or "characterization" there.

To approach creative writing instruction with the assumption that "the elements of craft come first" is to reinforce the idea that "writing" can be reduced to a collection of techniques and devices the student must master in order to become a certified writer. Creative Writing programs probably already do reduce the writing of poetry and fiction to a simple "how-to" process, and perhaps for reasons that at one time, at least, were unavoidable. "An Overview of Literature" and "Critical Analysis" (mostly understood as formal analysis and "close reading") were expected to be at the heart of literary study as offered by most English departments, to which was added "creative writing" as a kind of practicum. Over the past twenty-five years, most English departments have more and more withdrawn from this arrangement, offering less and less of an "overview" in order to concentrate on Theory or Cultural Study, and programs in Creative Writing, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, are going to have to pick up the slack by providing more critical-literary instruction or else their students will have practically no "background in literature" at all.

One of the first things they should do is to insist that there is no "craft" involved in writing poetry and fiction unless this simply means that both forms have a history that provides us with models of how the form was used at some point in the past. Imitating those models might have some initial pedagogical value, but ulimately the best writers will learn how to discard them. Beyond that, craft becomes only the self-applied anasthetic of literature.